For two weeks workers at the plant have been battling to regain control of the systems that were supposed to be perfectly safe. Risking their lives in their valiant attempts to manage many difficult problems they face to get things back to some sort of safe and stable situation.

How can this have happened when we have been told for years that nuclear power was perfectly safe and there was no chance of anything going wrong?

Yes, the plant suffered a 9.0 earthquake which is more than it had been designed for. Yes it suffered from a very high tsunami that was higher and more powerful than the plant had been designed to cope with but surely that is the whole point. It was not designed to cope with what nature threw at it. It was not safe.

Now we are being told that Japan is a special case. The situation there is very different to the UK. We do not suffer frequent powerful earthquakes and we do not suffer from devastating tsunamis.

That may be true today. There was a devastating tsunami in 1396. Who knows what tomorrow might bring. When the nuclear lobby claims something is safe they seem to use a different standard to the rest of us. Their idea of safety is that things will probably be ok. They think that if something is unlikely to happen that means it is safe.

Most of us humans consider something is safe when it can never do you any harm. Cars can be dangerous and many people die on our roads every year but just having a car sitting outside your house will not kill you. Having a nuclear power station next door could.

We are told we must have nuclear if we are to avoid catastrophic shortages of power in the future. Really? Well, why not start by ensuring we don’t waste what we already have?

We have all seen pictures of the city of London light up like a beacon in the evenings when there is hardly anybody working. Lights are left on, computers are left on. Huge amounts of energy are going to waste. We have shops with their front doors wide open in winter and you can feel the blast of hot air leaving the premises as you walk into the store.

We waste energy at an appalling rate and the way energy suppliers work and bill us means that it gets cheaper the more you use. Surely that is back to front if we are supposed to becoming a greener society?

Instead of going more nuclear we should be looking to put solar panels on the roof of every home in the country. The installation of solar panels on the roof of a house offers the possibility of collecting energy from the sun throughout daylight hours. A town with every roof covered by solar panels would generate considerable amounts of clean renewable power with complete safety and wit no problems of disposal of nuclear waste by having to store it and arrange security for a thousand years.

It is astonishing that we have not been furiously developing tidal power. We live on an island surrounded by powerful seas yet we have done very little to collect any of the massive amounts of energy available within those waves and tides.

It is very likely there will be a huge backlash in Japan against Nuclear power. Since they have few energy resources it would seem likely that Japan will go into the development and installation of Solar power and wave and tidal energy in a big way. They will probably take the place we could have had of being a world leader in tidal power technology.

We must learn lessons from the problems faced by the nuclear plant in Japan. We may not suffer the same type of devastating problems but what would happen if the whole of the North of England and Scotland were affected by some sort of nuclear accident? The consequences are too scary to contemplate but the possibility, no matter how small, must be considered.

The lesson should surely be that we should fully develop other, much safer technologies before we go using Nuclear Power. Encouragement of better and more efficient use of energy would be a good start. Insulating our homes and cutting down on wasteful business practices would make much more sense.

If there were no money to be made from building nuclear power stations and their use didn’t provide the raw material for nuclear bombs you can be sure there would be nobody wanting to build nuclear power stations.

We claim to be concerned for the planet we leave behind for our children so we cannot leave them piles of nuclear waste that they will still be having to manage in a thousand years, just so we can have neon lights flashing their advertising at us. We need sensible use of the power we already have available and much greater use of solar power and wind and tidal energy collection systems.

Japan is said to be the most prepared nation in the world for coping with the effects of earthquakes and they have survived very well it seems, with buildings relatively undamaged by an enormously powerful earthquake.

The word Tsunami is Japanese. They have been aware of the possibility and preparing for such an event for many years. The result of the tsunami on towns and villages on the North Eastern coast of Japan is staggering. To see the ground stripped bare where a town once stood is to see how powerless we humans are when compared to the forces of nature.

Thousands of lives have been lost and for many, perhaps most of the survivors life will never, ever, feel the same again. How can anyone ever hope to overcome such a devastating shock and come to terms with the fact that everything you ever knew and recognized has disappeared. Friends, family, local landmarks and poplar places you visited, all gone, leaving barely a trace of their previous existence.

The consequences of the tsunami on the nuclear power plants on the coast appear to have been extremely serious. The cooling plant which is essential to the safe maintenance of the reactor core has been damaged and made ineffective. The management of the power plants have resorted to using seawater in an attempt to keep the nuclear rods cooled to a safe level. As I write this they are still struggling to achieve this basic requirement.

Throughout all the chaos as every risky rumour has appeared the people in charge have talked it down and argued that everything was under control and public safety was not at risk.

Shortly after each of these comforting announcements we have heard that actually things are worse than had been admitted but everything is under control. It would seem to be the case that what they think ‘under control’ means and what we think, are two entirely different things.

Perhaps all businesses are like this and it is standard business spin but when you are talking about an industry that has the potential to cause enormous loss of life and cause serious illness in many thousands of people you have to ask if the use of business speak and spin is appropriate.

There is an incredible lack of transparency and, it would seem, honesty in the nuclear industry. Throughout it’s history it has been secretive and less than honest about problems it has faced. Things do not appear to have changed over time and we are still assured that nuclear power is a safe and very green technology.

There is no doubt that events in Japan are exceptional. Things like this do not happen every day but there is no way of knowing that some sort of natural disaster will not happen tomorrow in the UK, the USA or anywhere else. The problem with exceptional events is that they are exceptions to the rule and as such are difficult to plan for.

Perhaps the biggest lessons are not that there are risks to using nuclear energy but actually that we are using too much energy. Perhaps we should be asking ourselves if we really need this much energy. Is it that important that we have brightly lit stores selling us electrical goods that use even more energy?

Nature has demonstrated just how insignificant we are and what a fragile species we are. Technology doesn’t keep us safe and it could even make us weaker. In a society dependent on centralised water supplies, food supplies, energy supplies and needing access to mobile phones and the internet, we are not well prepared for coping with a disaster where all those resources have disappeared.

No doubt Japan will recover from this disaster and we wish them well in their recovery but lessons need to be learned about being prepared for unlikely but catastrophic events and whether control, support services and supply lines should be more localised so that one area being devastated does not mean that larger areas are severely affected by the consequences of that devastation but we must have more transparency and honesty from the nuclear power industry if we are to make sensible choices about energy supplies in the future.

The Post Office reports that the rubber bands are biodegradeable and they are reused where possible. The cost is around £2,600 per day which must be petty cash in terms of the numbers of letters and packets dealt with each day by the PO.

Meanwhile the Keep Britain Tidy campaign says that they do not consider dropping rubber bands as the worst litter in the world but it is still litter.

It amazes me that while you can get fined £65.00 for dropping a cigarette butt apparently rubber bands are free to drop and are not considered a significant problem.

How can this be justified? A cigarette butt dropper is some sort of master criminal who must be stopped at all costs while you can run along the high street dropping rubber bands and be considered a minor nuisance.

It is no wonder people are so anti establishment these days. We have no respect for those in power because they are such hypocrites. If a rubber band is not important litter then nor is a cigarette end and if ciggarettes are terrible litter then so are rubber bands. Double standards just demonstrate the foolishness of those in power.

Of course rubber bands are litter and so are cigarette ends but to fine anyone who drops either of them £65 is ridiculous. We should all be more concerned about our local environment and educating everyone to show respect for our house, streets and parks is the only way for a civilised society to proceed.

If you haven’t seen the tv programmes let me briefly explain.

There are quotas given to every fishing boat as to how much of certain species they are allowed to land. The theory is that by restricting the numbers of these species that are caught the overall stocks can be maintained and perhaps increased.

It is fine in theory but the reality is totally different. Trawlers fishing for haddock or plaice will also catch assorted cod and other species that they are not allowed to bring ashore and sell. So around 50% of the fish caught in the nets end up bing thrown back overboard as dead fish.

It was shocking to see this on TV. These fish have been killed in the process of being caught up in the nets and they are thrown away as rubbish even though having died they are not going to help replenish the fish stocks.

There are people starving all over the world and every day, because of the quota system, we are throwing away hundreds of tons of good fish.

These animals are dying so that we can have food and they are not even being used for food. They are known as ‘discards’ and they died for no reason.

It is shocking that we have a system in place that is not protecting fish from being caught and nor is it helping to supply is with food. It is simply causing incredible waste.

I urge you to follow the link below and read more about this. You can also watch the TV programmes through Channel4′s 4OD online TV viewing site.

Once you have seen the programmes you will be as shocked as I was. Trawlermen are risking their lives every day to catch fish for us and to see how they have to throw away good fish to avoid prosecution for going over their quotas is depressing but even more upsetting is seeing the fish dying for no purpose. The quota system is clearly not the solution I thought it was and I doubt you will think so either.

Hugh’s Fish Fight – About Hugh’s Fish Fight.

It may seem pretty obvious but hanks to the clean benefits of solar energy it has no such problems. Leaking solar energy is not likely to do much damage. We should be focusing more and more on the clean renewable energy technologies we have available to provide for some if not all of our energy needs and we need to put more effort into reducing our energy requirements so we can call an end to the oil based economy and start on the clean and renewable energy based economy in the future.

Didn’t we just have an iPhone released that was supposed to be the best phone on the planet? Oh, maybe that was a year ago. A whole year, wow. So what has changed since?

Sure, the iPhone looks cute and it is a beautifully designed little thing but does the world really need another 110 million mobile phones thrown in the rubbish bin because a thinner, faster, improved screen version has been released? Hopefully, the old models will be recycled but is the the great achievement of the human civilization, to be able to come up with another wasteful technology product that everyone feels they must have and then replace, every six or twelve months?

The success of the human race may prove to be its downfall. Like a virus that grows and grows until it eventually kills its host we have come to dominate our home planet. We have bred and increased the population to the point where the resources of the planet are being stretched to supply our needs and our needs have grown along with the population.

Once we would have been happy to have enough food to eat and enough wood to build a shelter and keep warm. Now, it seems, we have to have homes and lives full of technology that is draining not just our capacity to provide the energy to power all these gadgets but it is also draining us of the limited time we have every day.

Thre was once a time when a product had a limited lifetime. That time was usually limited by how long it would last before finally breaking down. With todays efficient design and manufacturing that is far less of a problem and manufacturers have had to find another way of convincing us it is time to replace a product.

The result is a constant stream of new releases. Just like with the washing powder adverts of years ago, each new version of our phones, computers, TVs and cars is New And Improved but can life be sustained at this pace?

Humans have been successful because we have been able to think ahead and learn from our mistakes and we are naturally lazy and always look for a better and easier way of doing things. We have developed technology that has enabled us to improve our health, our comfort and our lives to a degree unimaginable to people of a few generations ago but how much longer can this go on at the incredible rate of change we are experiencing these days.

A thousand years ago at a time when the Romans were conquering Europe people no doubt thought of it as the end of the world and for many of them, it probably was, but in those times change took decades or even centuries. Looking forward it is impossible to imagine what changes there might be in the next thousand years but one thing is very clear. We cannot go on as we are doing right now.

The popluation is growing enormously and there are few undiscovered places left to be exploited to supply our growing needs. Our demand for resources grows exponentially though the supply of those resources is finite and reducing as we use them. In the past plague, pestilance and wars kept the population in check while local supply of food and resources limited the possibilities of the local population. Now the worlds resources are available to all, at a price, but the cost is more than just money.

We have been on a consumption binge that has lasted twenty or thirty years but the financial impact of this became clear when the world financial system came close to collapse. Hopefully, we are working our way out of the problems that caused but it is easier to print money to sort out a fnancial crisis than it is to find the minerals and food to sort out a world short of both.

The simple fact is that we cannot continue as we are now. The new iPhone may be a magnificent example of man’s ingenuity, design skills and technological achievements but we need to face up to the fact that we need to reduce our consumption of the resources available to a far more manageable level if we want future generations of humans to have any chance of having a happy and healthy life.

The resources we are throwing away will not be replaced. When they are gone nothing will be left for the future. It may not happen within our lifetime but if we have any concerns for future generations then we should be thinking about the long term consequences of our actions now.

We are always being told how safe things are and that there is no need to be concerned. The oil industry would claim an excellent record but that is of no use when things do suddenly go terribly wrong.

Just suppose this was a nuclear power plant that suffered catastrophic failure and it was as difficult to shut down and secure as this oil well is proving to be. What chance would the local population have and how wide an area of the country might be permanently unusable?

It is all very well saying there is only a one in one hundred thousand chance or whatever the figure is, but when you have 1,000 nuclear facilities around the world that suggests we can expect to get one failure every ten years.

We actually have 437 operating nuclear power stations at present, according to the European Nuclear Society, with another 55 under construction. The old plants are reaching the ends of their lives in many cases and new construction is likely to be safer and better designed than the earlier ground breaking installations but if there is one thing to be learned from the OIL rig disaster in the USA. If it can go wrong, it might.

It doesn’t matter how many safety features you have installed. You can train people until they are blue in the face. Whatever you do, nothing is certain and mistakes, errors and unexpected events can occur that throw all your plans and security measures out of the window.

We are facing an enormous environmental disaster from a simple underwater pipe that carries oil out of the ground heaven forbid we ever have to deal with a nuclear power station out of control that we are unable to shut down or contain.

Accidents happen, that’s why they are called accidents, and I don’t care how well you plan something is sure to go wrong sometime though human error or malfunction.

Remember the spacecraft that crashed into Mars because some of the calculations had been done in Imperial measurements and others done in Metric? They were very clever people who managed to make such a careless mistake. People make mistakes, it’s what makes us human.

So, when I heard that government ministers were supporting a proposal that we should have fewer cows and sheep and we should all eat less meat which would reduce our intake of saturated fats, it all made a lot of sense. At least, it did until the ministry of agriculture heard what was going on. They reacted rather forcefully stating that farmers and the meat industry would not agree. Really? The meat industry would oppose us all being healthier and improving the climate? Now there’s a strange thing.

Suddenly all the other supporters in government started to backtrack on cows and this time the methane was pouring out of the mouths of Ministers in their eagerness to deny they actually supported the idea. It seems the votes of farmers and the meat industry matter far more than the health of the nation and the planet.

I guess it was hoping for a lot to think that any member of parliament would put the health of the nation and the climate before getting votes. Silly me for thinking they might.

If removing the plastic bag from society were the answer life would be nice and simple but of course this is simply the tip of a very large iceberg. The truth of the matter is that the plastic bag you carry your shopping home in is almost irrelevent in terms of using environmental resources. Many people reuse them for all sorts of uses. I personally use all the bags I get as bin liners for my kitchen waste bin.

It is what goes in the bag that is the problem. All the waste materiels you get when you have unpacked your shopping, the tomatoes that might have been shipped in by air from Spain, or Egypt or Chile. Strawberries out of season flown in from the southern hemisphere. There is just so much STUFF.

If Gordon Brown wants to show he really has green credentials he needs to lead a change of mindset that stops and thinks about what we buy and where we buy it from. We have been encouraged to think that buying new stuff all the time is good for us and good for the economy. It certainly generates money but good for us? Hardly. There are as many if not more unhappy people around now as there were years ago before all this consumerism came along. New TVs don’t make people happy. They give us a brief moment of elation as we get our new toy but that feeling soon fades. We are much like our children and we would get as excited and almost as much satisfaction from playing with the box as we get from the new toy that came in that box.

We don’t need to worry much about the plastic bag. The amount of material used in the making of them is negligable and their environmental impact can be reduced through the use of bidegradable versions. It isn’t the bag we need to worry about. What we should be worrying about is the fact that the contents of the bag have had a lot of carbon pumped into the atmosphere to get it in the shop for us to buy and put in our plastic bag and most of the time we don’t need them.

This is the tragedy of the environmental crisis we face. It isn’t that we have damaged our planet to get food for our children. We have damaged the planets ability to support life so we can have new and bigger cars, new abd bigger tvs, newer fashionable kitchens replacing one that was only put in a couple of years ago, trips to foreign countries for stag nights and strawberries at christmas.

It hasn’t made people happy and it has caused immense damage to the environment we depend on for life itself. We may already have done too much damage for human being to survive in the future, only time will tell, but as an epitaph we will be able to read. Here lies the human race. A wonderful opportunity wasted by greed for money and material things.