pumpkinstrokemarrow

The other event of the day was reading about how the Italians have put one over Berlusconi by stopping him from building any more nuclear power stations. Or something like that. Talk about bashing the nose to please the face. And the Germans, normally a stolid and sensible lot, did something similar a few weeks ago. Knee jerk reaction from the bad business in Japan.

Given our dependence on power - even very green veggies are generally quite keen on hot baths - and the state of supply, you might think that voters would go for whatever offered a bit of energy security, or at least a bit of diversity of production. Spread the risk a bit. But no, in the wisdom of our collective minds orgo has become good and nuclear has gone off-orgo. So we can't have it. And saying we can't have it is also a good way of having a pop at the capitalist-industrialist-old-etonian nexus which runs the country. So let's have a pop.

And while we are at it, let's have a pop at windmills too.

Where on earth do these people think the power is going to come from when the Chinese use as much of the stuff as we do and the Middle East has gone up in smoke? Or the Somali pirates have sunk all the oil tankers.

The French, by way of contrast, still seem quite keen on nuclear, doing a lot more of it than pretty much anyone else. They have done something useful with all the expertise built up in their force de frappe, stupid though that might be for other reasons and assuming that there is indeed some useful spin off from bombs to power stations. Would you employ a used nuclear bomb engineer in a nearly new nuclear power station?

PS: there is some popular phrase about bashing the nose to spite the face, but, for once, Mr. Google unhelpful. Lots of hits about people bashing each other to intemperate language but nothing about the phrase. So I can't even get the phrase right, never mind know where it came from.