Nuclear news

The Post says 'Japan's largest industrial electronics maker has signed a £700 million deal to buy the UK's nuclear project Horizon, which will build new reactors at Wylfa, Angelsey, and Oldbury, South Gloucestershire...' (here). They should say is planning to build, subject to conditions being right and obtaining the various proper permissions.

Saying 'will build' is distinctly premature and it's bad journalism (again) from The Post not to give further details eg Hitachi has: not worked out exactly how much it would cost to build six new nuclear power plants in the UK; a government-guaranteed "strike price", or minimum price for nuclear generated power, has not yet been hammered out; it is not clear when the plants would be completed, nor who would operate them; the boiling water nuclear reactor system that Hitachi is keen to install has yet to be granted UK safety approval... http://tinyurl.com/8fn58rn

There are many ways to build energy security - most of which would generate more jobs and more efficiently and more quickly and without increasing the legacy of nuclear waste to future generations.

Horizon: Science Under Attack

Great program, very revealing. Climate sceptics/deniers - or at least some of them - put faith and ideology before experiment, evidence and reason. Science is imperfect but faith and ideology tells us not to question and not to test things out to discover what's really going on.

Nobel Prize winner Sir Paul Nurse examines why science appears to be under attack, and why public trust in key scientific theories has been eroded - from the theory that man-made climate change is warming our planet, to the safety of GM food, or that HIV causes AIDS.
He interviews scientists and campaigners from both sides of the climate change debate, and travels to New York to meet Tony, who has HIV but doesn't believe that that the virus is responsible for AIDS.
This is a passionate defence of the importance of scientific evidence and the power of experiment, and a look at what scientists themselves need to do to earn trust in controversial areas of science in the 21st century.

BBC - BBC Two Programmes - Horizon, 2010-2011, Science Under Attack

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/jan/25/horizon-science-under-attack-review

BBC - BBC Two Programmes - Horizon, 2010-2011, What is One Degree?

Comedian Ben Miller returns to his roots as a physicist to try to answer a deceptively simple question: what is one degree of temperature?
His quest takes him to the frontiers of current science as he meets researchers working on the hottest and coldest temperatures in the universe, and to a lab where he experiences some of the strangest effects of quantum physics - a place where super-cooled liquids simply pass through solid glass. Plus, Ben installs his very own Met office weather station at home.
Ben's investigations in this personal and passionate film highlight the importance of measurement and accuracy in the 21st century.

BBC - BBC Two Programmes - Horizon, 2010-2011, What is One Degree?