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THOSE nice people at British Nuclear Fuels have just mailed out reprints
of a special magazine supplement dealing with the latest developments in
reprocessing spent nuclear fuel, a major slice of the company’s business.

The supplement appears in this month’s issue of the magazine Nuclear
Engineering International, and the articles include one on radiological
protection. Curiously, among all the discussion about the use of form badges,
stricter dose limits and reduced discharges, there is no mention of the
topic that rocked the nuclear industry earlier this year: the research suggesting
an increased risk of childhood cancers in the offspring of some workers
at Sellafield, where the company does its reprocessing.

Obviously, the piece could have done with some advice from Roger Berry,
director of health, safety and environment protection with the company,
and star of countless media interviews on the subject when the research
findings emerged eight months ago.

Oh dear, who’s that listed as one of the article’s authors? Yes, Roger
Berry.

* * *

A GENTLE hint for Oftel, Britain’s telecommunications watchdog, which
is currently looking at the high prices British Telecom charges for international
phone calls. BT has just unveiled its new communications control room at
Oswestry. The invited guests and journalists were told how BT can cleverly
beat congestion on lines to Europe by routing calls via the US while the
Americans are asleep and the satellite links are lying idle. Any questions?
Well, yes. If the lines are so idle, why do off-peak calls to the US cost
so much? Luckily, the man in charge of the unveiling was Anthony Booth,
managing director of BT International. Unluckily, he did not know anything
about transatlantic tariffs. Neither, it seemed, did anyone else at Oswestry.
But we know: the peak rate (3 pm to 5 pm) is 81p a minute; overnight (8
pm to 8 am) the rate is less than a quarter down, at 61p a minute.

And how do we know this? We called the operator, of course.

* * *

IT’S a watchdog’s life: red faces and shuffling feet were much in evidence
at the press conference launching the annual report of Britain’s National
Rivers Authority. Officials had to come clean on why the agency cannot prosecute
sewage companies which break the rules on how much pollution they can discharge
into waterways.

At any one time, anything up to 20 per cent of all sewage works breach
the law. But it seems that for the past 12 months many NRA staff who should
know better have been failing to keep the requisite number of monitoring
samples (three) needed for a successful prosecution. The NRA, you will recall,
was billed by ministers as Europe’s most powerful environmental agency when
it was created a year ago.

* * *

TIME for a new law of robotics: A robot shall not leave a project skint,
or by inaction cause it to be skint. Up at Strathclyde University, the Turing
Institute’s Robot Olympics was drawing in robots by the wheelbarrow. Or
at least, it was trying to. Two weeks before the event, despite sponsorship
from NatWest and the Scottish Development Agency (among others), the organisers
claimed to be down to their last 37 pence. So they sent out students to
try to borrow some barrows. A quick call to the Turing Institute to check
the story elicited nervous laughter. No, the barrows weren’t required after
all. Yes, they had all the sponsorship they needed.

* * *

IN an attempt to beat the latest price rise, Feedback raced into the
forecourt for a tankful of lead-free. Lingering guilt at the thought of
another 40 litres destined to boost the greenhouse effect was dispelled
by the bill. Cost apart, it carried a message (in pale green ink, naturally):
‘Environmentally Friendly: Manufactured from Recycled Paper with Environment
in Mind.’

* * *

ACCIDENTS will happen. John Efford, social services minister for Newfoundland,
drove into a moose last month. Days later, he announced a ‘make-work’ project:
more than 600 people would be taken on this autumn to clear brush along
the province’s main roads. The idea is to discourage moose from wandering
out on the road – and so to cut down accidents. The minister, you will be
relieved to know, escaped injury. ‘It wasn’t anything serious,’ he said.
The moose, however, is seriously dead.

* * *

EVERY crisis has a silver lining. Japan, alarmed at Washington’s growing
demands for support in the Gulf, has decided that a grand gesture of international
solidarity is needed . . . something like helping with the bill for the
US’s Superconducting Supercollider, the multi-billion-dollar particle accelerator
in Waxahachie, Texas. Paying a third of the cost would be far less politically
painful than the other two demands on America’s list: sending troops to
the Gulf, or allowing imports of rice. And where would the money come from?
Easy: from the overseas aid budget.

* * *

WHO’S this at the World Bank meeting in Washington DC earnestly telling
representatives of several environmental pressure groups last week that
their views ‘are a real factor in the internal discussions in the bank’?
None other than Kenneth Piddington, director of the bank’s environmental
division. And who’s this, minutes later, nodding off in full view of everyone
in the room as Francis Sullivan from the World Wide Fund for Nature held
forth on why the World Bank should stop lending money for logging in tropical
forests? Yes, exactly. So that must be what the World Bank means by internal
discussions.