Fukushima

Tuesday

Bryan Appleyard

Why going nuclear is humanity’s only hope

There are three parties when it comes to global warming. First, the hard right, which says it isn’t happening, and even if it is that we can do nothing about it. Then there are the far leftish Luddites who would smash all power generation systems, allowing only wind turbines, wave power etc. Finally there are the suave centrists who know perfectly well that only nuclear can save us. This book will become their bible. Tim Gregory is a nuclear scientist who works at Sellafield. He has a serious problem defending his conviction that nuclear is the answer: radiophobia, the terror people feel about radioactivity. Superficially, this terror seems well-founded. There

Wednesday

James Delingpole

Gratuitously twisty, turny nonsense: Sky Max’s Poker Face reviewed

Imagine if you had the power always to tell whether or not someone was lying. You’d have it made, wouldn’t you? The intelligence services would be queuing up to employ you for interrogations; top law firms would pay you top dollar to act as their adviser; you’d win gazillions in all the poker championships; you’d never buy a dodgy second-hand car, not that you’d need to with all that money you’d have. Admittedly, though, your life and adventures would make for a very boring TV series because everything would be so easy. Hence the tortured premise of Rian Johnson’s Poker Face, in which we are invited to believe that our

Saturday

Colin Brazier

Confessions of an accidental foreign correspondent

Perhaps you remember footage of the wave. It was mostly from traffic cameras, mute but darkly mesmerising. Millions of gallons of Pacific seawater upended by a 9.0 earthquake and hurled irresistibly inland. A few days later I saw what that meant, turning a corner in my hire-car to find the road blocked by a trawler that had been washed ashore. This week, Japan has commemorated the tenth anniversary of the tsunami which killed 15,000 of its people. A seismic tragedy which begat a man-made disaster. Inundated by water, part of the Fukushima nuclear reactor blew up, producing the worst radioactive leak since Chernobyl. It wasn’t long before scores of foreign journalists