Recently, the Government gave its formal backing to the creation of a new generation of nuclear power stations across the UK. Business Secretary, John Hutton, has told MPs that they would provide a “safe and affordable” route to securing the UK’s future energy supplies, while also combating global warming.

The plans entail speeding up the planning process to facilitate the construction of plants and the introduction of a new independent body to monitor decommissioning costs. The amount of energy that could be provided by the nuclear energy industry would not be capped. Hutton has also claimed that there will be “no public subsidies” for the nuclear industry.

It seems likely that the intended scheme would reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per kilowatt-hour of electricity, and so also the nation’s carbon footprint. In this sense, the proposal is a sensible step towards achieving this aim.

However, these plans are not likely to placate more militant environmentalists, due to the waste disposal problems. The intention is to create underground caverns so as to store the radioactive waste created within the UK, though the amount to be contributed by the firms who produce such waste, and where to place such a site, have yet to be decided. In the interim, the waste shall be stored at sites such as Sellafield.

John Hutton has expressed his concerns about the safety of such a plan, however, rejecting calls for a suitable storage site to be found before giving the scheme the green light. Currently, highly radioactive, vitrified (solidified) waste from Britain is stored at sites in Germany, if only temporarily.

Unfortunately, the prospect of sourcing all the UK’s energy needs from renewable energy sources seems low enough, without factoring in the economic factors.

The cost of sourcing energy from renewable energies is not merely monetary, as the rise in grain prices can be partially attributed to the desire to produce Bio-fuels from arable land. For the poor, especially in Third-World countries that import more grain than they produce, this may not be a price they are willing to pay for a better world in the distant future.

This, then, surely necessitates the construction of the next generation of nuclear power stations, to replace the current nuclear power plants that produce approximately 20% of the UK’s energy needs.

But there is a further factor to consider, and that is the matter of supply of uranium. For approximately the last twenty years, less uranium has been produced than has been consumed by the nuclear industry, the shortfall being filled by sales of surplus from the militaries (primarily the USA and the former USSR).

As the nuclear warhead decommissioning nears its end, and increasing tension between the West and Russia increases the prospect of reversing of non-proliferation policies, the shortfall will soon no longer be filled so extensively.

Due to a lack of investment by the mining industries, demand will continue to outstrip supply (as a mining project put forward today will take roughly 10 years to reach production) for quite some time to come. With OPEC recently attributing the high cost of crude to speculation (a price change from $22 a barrel in 2002 to $100 in 2007 due solely to an increase in demand?), it is unlikely that uranium prices will also remain unaffected by speculation, possibly driving up the price far above what it presently is.

Further economic factors include the cost of waste storage, maintenance and decommissioning. An independent body, the Nuclear Liabilities Financing Assurances Board, will look at the potential clean-up costs. The nuclear power stations presently in use will cost the government an estimated £70 billion to decommission.

Given these unknowns, it would seem quite difficult to come to an accurate prediction as to the profitability of the industry, let alone the safety.

by Mike Kelly

Are we going up again, or coming back home?

Oxford’s short terms are unique. One spends just under half the year at university, and the other half, allegedly, revising for the collections. But for Freshers, back for their second term, something often feels a bit off-key without the magic of Freshers’ week and the inherent newness of Oxford.

Personally, I felt like I was coming home last Thursday. And as my parents noticed over Christmas, I failed to even unpack. Maybe this was out of laziness, and the fact that my parents had kindly decided to use one half of my room for storage, blocking my wardrobe, desk, and making the simple act of getting into bed more cumbersome than an army assault course, but perhaps it had some deeper psychological meaning: that I didn’t really feel like I was home.

And many other students feel the same. You slip so easily into the privacy of locked doors, en-suite bathrooms (if you’re lucky), and in general the sense of independence and freedom which being at home lacks. And in case you might be overjoyed at being back home, the mountain of holiday work is a nice reminder that Oxford is never far away.

Once you’re back, the Ford deals you a sharp, but by no means short, shock to the system. I had to endure six hours of exams preceded by an all-night revision marathon before I could even think about hunting down all the friends whom I’d missed being able to see every day.

Others, however, will always find the ordeal of washing their own clothes and dealing with the banalities of making sure there’s enough bread and gin to hand quite impossible.  It’s unlikely that graduation will see them much more adept at coping. Others are so tied to their friends and family at home that they can’t wait to get back after the first term. Most are just plain exhausted.

The majority of Freshers argue that you never really quite recover from that infamous first week, and it’s not long before the fifth week blues hit; then there’s the mandatory final fortnight of partying to max yourself out before you’re sent away to make room for other Oxford hopefuls.

Admittedly I found even myself talking about going 'back' with reference to Oxford, not home. In fact, uttering those words 'going home' left me rather dejected.  But in general, perhaps we Freshers should wait a few more vacations before deciding what we really call ‘home'.  Or indeed, maybe the sixteen week summer vacation will bring us back to our roots. Wherever they are for now!

Port Mahon, HT 08 Week 1, 13 JanuaryThe upstairs of the Port Mahon is an unassuming venue – the stage rocks the ‘my best mate’s living room’ vibe, complete with fireplace and telly moved out of the way to fit in the drum kit. Well, almost.The humble staging, however, was actually the perfect offset for three very different musical outfits. Figment were back on stage after a couple of months away from the live scene. The Bristol three-piece unleashed their brand of snarling, brawling rock with vim and fervour. Their energy was almost uncontainable, mic stands askew and t-shirts duly stripped, delivered at ear-splitting volume. They announced themselves with Reservoir Dogs style shouts and a bass line more infectious than an outbreak of food poisoning at a picnic serving prawn cocktail for starters.Figment are clearly very tight – the illusion of spontaneity is clearly underpinned by the old formula talent versus practise. Drummer Harvey was impressive (and not just because of his pectorals), blowing out any January cobwebs with one particular drum solo that shook your very bones. The fairly subdued Sunday night crowd didn’t really know how to respond to the sweating, swaggering beast that commanded their attention. Figment don’t promise to change the world, but they do put out for a filthily good time. Look out for them live in 2008.

Next up were the Will Knox Band. The difference between the two bands couldn’t have been more marked. Will Knox leads his melancholy band of boys and girls through heartbreaking acoustic folk-tinged tunes. Two things raise them above a slew of Jose-Gonzalez sound-alikes: the first is the quality of the song-writing.The lyrics are quietly well observed: “please don’t neglect me like a dress you outgrew”, “I’m as empty as the pockets of my skin tight jeans.” The second is Will Knox himself – his understated charisma asserts an irresistible pull. His clear and tender vocals are nuanced by bass-player Jeni Magana's. The breath catching moment of the night was their stripped acoustic number. With their soft West Coast glamour, the Will Knox band put me in a position that I never thought I’d be in, thinking: “Man, that was an intense banjo solo.” No pretension, just lush strings and effortless atmosphere: lovely, lovely stuff.

Finally, Mister Ginger took to the stage. What to expect with such variety preceding them? Mister Ginger are an Oxford four piece, bridging the Balliol/Trinity divide by making sweet music. They don’t have a particularly coherent look, at odds with the unity of their music, which is expressed in the verve and imagination with which they play. Once more tonight it’s the drums that that drive this operation forward – Nick Wallace with Pete Ballett on bass are a potent combination.Mr Ginger are a more complex entity than the two previous bands, and definitely show the most variety in terms of style of song-writing. I am frustrated as to pin them down generically. Shall we say 'intelligent, layered, witty guitar rock', and then leave you to hunt them down in Myspace monde? Good. Because you should. And join the campaign to get them to play again before Trinity Ball.

All in all, Port Mahon offered an unexpectedly well balanced night of high quality, passionate and professional music. Such an eclectic mix shouldn’t have worked, but it really, truly did. Roll on Hilary Term.by Mathura Umachandran

A protester, living in a tree in Bonn Square which was due to be chopped down, was forced to leave yesterday and has been arrested on suspicion of aggravated trespass.

Gabriel Chamberlain set up his temporary “tree-house” in Bonn Square 11 days ago, but eventually left voluntarily at 11am after he ran out of food and water supplies. Last night he was in custody and it is understood that he has received some medical attention.

However, his supporters still made one last-ditch attempt to save the tree by charging security fencing around the tree at around 12.30pm as the chainsaws started up. Another activist, Brian Melling, managed to climb into a council truck; he was removed but not charged.

The tree was later felled, but protesters remained in the square throughout. The sycamore tree was one of four which have been cut down as part of a “face-lift” for Bonn Square. The plan is to improve CCTV surveillance and generally make the square more attractive.

Activists may not have succeeded in saving this particular tree, but many maintain that they would do the same thing again if other trees were threatened.By Sian Cox-Brooker

I have met many curious gentlemen. I shall tell you about four of them.

One.
The first was Phil, the heavy metal musician. I went for a drink in a bar with some students. Having played the tambourine with that amazing Japanese bass guitarist that plays on Cornmarket sometimes, I decided to ask him if I could join him and borrow his tambourine. He looked and me and said,
– No.
So I walked off, slightly disillusioned with the supposed kindness of Belgians. After a song he came back and said,
– Where are you from?
– England.
– If you like you can sing…
– No, I do not sing.
We discussed Led Zeppelin and Oxford and then I went to the toilet. When I came down, my students had orchestrated me going on stage, and as I secretly wanted to anyhow, I went up and sung a Beatles song and a Dylan song. I pity the audience. Phil said I could come back next Thursday, but I'm inclined to think it is because he wanted something scrawny rather than my voice. I never did.

Two.
The second was an illustrator. He was sitting in the corner of a restaurant and I took my notebook to him. We talked about cheap art utensils from supermarkets, and he showed me the magazine he drew for sometimes. He'd been to the art school in Liege. I told him about my sister and her thesis on Robert Crumb, and he told me he liked to chill with Robert Crumb's daughter. The illustrator is my new idol and I have knuckled down to the comic strips I've been wanting to make for a while. Earlier that day, I'd been into the FNAC, a culture shop, to browse through the independent comic books and read some really good stuff, and then I'd visited an independent comic book shop. So many coincidences!

Three.
The third was the jazz man who wore a beautiful navy blue jumper. Claire (see my last blog entry) and I were on one of those wonderful dawdle days. We were looking for the museum of Walloon art but saw a sign post for "The House Of Jazz," we looked about and walked into a bulding. After visiting the first floor and the lift, we went back down to the first floor and Claire knocked on a door. The man in a blue jumper opened the door and looked at us inquisitively. We returned the gaze, then I said
– We saw the sign outside. We just walked in.
He explained about the place, which was basically an office with racks full of vinyls smothering the walls and the odd photo of a man with a sax or a harp, the odd bookshelf and aged vinyl players. He told us the nights where we could listen to Jazz in Liege. His jumper was beautiful, he was not so much but that is not my problem.

Four.
The fourth man I'm going to mention in this episode is not a good one, as the others were indeed good ones. The fourth man is my stalker. I was putting up a Tea Time (Mondays 2PM www.48fm.com) poster, attatching it to a lamp post with sticky tape. He stopped and said,
– Hello. I think you are very pretty. You go to the Haute Ecole?
– Err yes I do. How do you know that?
– I work in the café opposite, I see you every morning. You are very pretty.
– Right.
– Can I have your telephone number?
– Err, well, I don't know my number, and, well, it doesn't have any batteries.
– Oh.
– I guess I'll see you when I walk past the café!
Since I have bumped into him five times, and made myself out to be in a hurry each time. The fact that he knows where I live and work, and I often bump into him leads me to conclude that I have indeed acquired my very first stalker. Of all the curious gentlemen, he is the most horrid and scary and uninteresting. And revolting.

Love it or hate it, the BP Portrait Award is back again. It is often either exalted as a wonderful exercise in human soul searching and a celebration of the artist’s skill, or derided as “the art equivalent of the Eurovision Song Contest” before that became ironic, as the Guardian’s Jessica Lack put it. This year, open to all artists over 18 (rather than just those under 40, as in previous years), the competition has attracted 1,870 submissions, a record high since its inception in 1980. The sixty selected by this year’s jury are on display at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh until April, representing a staggering diversity of both subjects and approaches. Friends, family members, celebrities and even an anonymous commuter are rendered in styles ranging from the poor end of an evening art class to intense photorealism, loose impressionism and surrealism. Not bad, considering that painted portraiture was once considered to be ‘dying out’ in the modern world.

In some ways, encouraging painted portraiture in the modern world is difficult, given how tricky it can be to divorce the idea of a painted portrait from its most basic: a realistic representation of a person. And unfortunately, few paintings in the exhibition manage to get past this. The many photorealistic portraits, for example, are an interesting demonstration of technical skill, but not necessarily of artistic ability. Some of the submissions, however, do make attempts to engage with the genre in a new way. In “Nisha” by Darvish Fakhr, a young girl sits on a stool in a Disney princess ball gown and plastic children’s jewellery – a dark and cheapened take on Velazquez’s paintings of Spanish court princesses. Timothy Hyman’s “She and Me” is inspired in composition by Rembrandt’s self portraits of the artist poised at the canvas, yet in execution is highly expressionistic. Emmanouil Bitakis’ “Portrait” sets the subject in a surreal landscape in which he floats beside a flower, a fly and a moth, with a separate painting of a male nude below. The genre is bent in other ways too. For example, “Time to Talk” by Lynn Ahrens, which depicts a strange, distorted, unidentifiable, androgynous creature whose semi-abstract form is strongly rooted not in the quality of the subject, but of the paint, moves us uncomfortably away from what we expect from a portrait. The surreal “A. C. Grayling” by Thomas Leveritt shows the professor sitting reading in the midst of a melting ice-flow of dripping words, dissolving into his element, as it were.

However, whilst there are interesting interpretations of a genre that initially seems limited, the ultimate issue is not the genre, but the generally dull level of the exhibition. For, despite the increased number of applicants, the diversity of style and the technical proficiency that many display, there seems little in the way of expressive power. Much of it is reduced to clever play, rather than any genuine exploration of the people depicted or the mode of their depiction. Perhaps the competition either needs to find some way to attract a higher calibre of painter, or to expand its repertoire to explore portraiture through more diverse media.

by Hannah Dingwall

At times, when reading War and Peace, I began to think that the whole book is, in fact, an attempt by Tolstoy to keep his reader interested long enough to listen to his theory of history. Now I study history, so I really tried to be interested; and the historical bits about Napoleon and the Russian Campaign were pretty good. But Tolstoy’s historical theorising drags on as he repeats his message of inescapable, inexplicable inevitability.

Luckily, this doesn’t matter too much. For, despite its title, War and Peace is best read not for the history, but for the characters. Discussing this book with other people, what seems to stick most strongly is Tolstoy’s incredible understanding of his characters: in no other author do you find such a firm grasp of the motives behind each one. This makes a big difference as to how you think about them; you can’t simply root for the hero and hope the villain dies, because you’re given an equal understanding of their needs and weaknesses. If there was a book to prove the phrase ‘to know all is to forgive all’, this would be it.

Unlike his views on history, Tolstoy never explicitly sets out his views on morality. I can’t recall a single instance when he passes a moral judgement on someone. The strength of the book is that, by the end, you understand Tolstoy’s idea of right and wrong, and it is all the more powerful for the subtle, yet simple way he introduces it, showing motives and consequences. As the book’s morality is slowly revealed, so too is its sense of the possibility for happiness, in the personal quests all characters undertake. I was greatly influenced by the idea that you should be able to find happiness in almost any situation, if you consider the world in a certain way. This is what the book is really about; war is just a background, as Tolstoy himself admits.

Tolstoy’s idea of the ease of happiness is what prevents War and Peace having a ‘proper ending’. With his aim of showing life as it really is, and his belief that happiness is, in fact, very ordinary and imperfect, ending the book with a climax wouldn’t have made sense. Endings really only exist in Art; in real life, the remaining people have the rest of their lives to live. That’s why not having a dramatic finale is actually one of the book’s strengths.

When I finished the book I felt a sense of achievement. It wasn’t just that it was fifteen hundred pages long or that it took me a month to read. I really felt I’d learned something from this book in a way unlike any other. Perhaps I’m just trying to justify the time I spent (the Stockholm Syndrome of books), but I don’t think so. In any case, if you haven’t read it, go out and do so. The length is daunting, but I guarantee you won’t regret it.

By Michael Bennett

I came across this German website, which lets you search for the frequency of different surnames across the country. It relies on phone book entries, so it’s not totally accurate, but it’s a bit of fun. There exist still in Germany:

1 telephone directory entry for Hitler on the north coast

846 Goebbels, mostly near the French border

1519 Eichmanns

7 entries for the surname Auschwitz

19 Lederhoses

3 Ahmadinejads

70 Blairs

7 Thatchers

8 Beckhams

16 Rooneys

3 Mourinhos

53 entries for Benitez

88 Giulianis

And finally, 230 Edwards, 9 Clintons but no Obamas.

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Rhiannon Nicolson, Jenny Moore and Sangwon Yoon present the Cherwell24 holiday news round up. Tune in next week for 1st week news round up.
 

I never thought I'd have a heading for films on this blog. When I got to Belgium I visited the Ardennes, beautiful forest, nothing to do with films. When I got up this morning (afternoon in fact, as I am following the year abroad agenda to a q, minus partying), I was planning on an uneventful day. I went to the Mediatheque to get films and cds and books and then met the others from my radio show to put up posters (incidently, 2pm British time on www.48fm.com). I saw a poster for a Michael Winterbottom film and decided to go along with my friend Claire. We walked in to the projection room without noticing the film had moved room, but we persevered and a film came on. It was a series of experimental films where they'd reused old reels to make new ones. The quality was excellent, I thought, " wow this has made my week worthwhile." It doesn't stop there. Claire and I decide to go for dinner and, having met in film class and just seen a bunch of eye-opening films, we began discussing films. I told her about the Belgian brothers who won the Palme D'or at Cannes a couple of years back with their particularly grimey film "L'Enfant". She wrote the brothers' name down in her notebook. We stepped outside and she noticed some filming going on across the street. We sat on a bench and watched until a woman came up to us and told us we were in the shot, she told us that it was precisely these Belgian brothers who were shooting a film in front of us. We moved to behind the camera and watched the monitors until a man came up to us and alsked us if we wanted to be in the film we happily accepted but gave up after the twelfth shot because of the cold, and we weren't being paid. The Dardennes brothers. The Ardennes have more to do with films than you'd suppose.