Boss Radio

Hey, stop groaning. You're lucky. I was going to go with 'Have we had our fission chips?' until the man-with-the-hat threatened me with the most unpleasant death since the mysterious 'unexpectedly warm day frozen slurry accident' in Siberia which everyone denies ever happened.

One of the biggest lies in regular use today is that nuclear power is safe. No it's not. We know it, they know it, and Mad Jack McMadjack the Mad of Madjacksonville knows it. It's "safety" relies upon political class security and a lot of concrete. Nuclear power is dangerous, and that's why they don't build them in cities.

They're not, of course, the only dangerous entities on this planet, but most of the the really dangerous stuff is at least fully understood, the problem with nuclear power is that we can only protect its generating plants against the known. The unknown is a bit of a problem.

Today an 'expert' said on the news "We, thank goodness, can build on safe bedrock. We're not on a faultline", and that, oh people of Earth, is the kind of attitude that terrifies me.

Britain does get earthquakes. It gets loads of them. Very occasionally they gather up enough force to tip someone out of bed or bring a garden wall down, and then they get talked about, but most of the time they go unfelt and ignored.

That doesn't mean they're not there.

Just because we've never had anything approaching a major quake doesn't mean we never will, just because we've never been hit by a tsunami doesn't mean we never will, and just because terrorists from the planet Zoqq haven't bombed us doesn't mean they never will. In other words there's always going to be something unexpected waiting in the wings.

If there wasn't, we'd have no need for newsreaders.