Latest news with #Windscale
The National
3 days ago
- Politics
- The National
Scots aren't having our voices heard – nuclear is one such case study
It was organised by Britain Remade, a lobby group headed by former Tory spad Sam Richards. He described Britain Remade as a 'cross-party campaigning group' that believes in economic growth and building infrastructure. Britain Remade's campaign, 'New Scottish Nuclear Power', aims to reverse Scotland's ban on new nuclear power. Also present were councillor Norman Hampshire, the leader of East Lothian Council (ELC) and chair of the planning committee, and Labour MSP for South Scotland Martin Whitfield. READ MORE: Why the UK media 180 on Gaza is too little, too late Richards boasted about the UK's nuclear power track record. In 1956, the world's first nuclear reactor, Calder Hall, was built in Sellafield, Cumbria. The plant produced plutonium for the UK nuclear weapons programme – electricity for the domestic market was a sideline. Throughout its 47-year life, it exposed workers and the public to higher levels of radiation than comparable reactors and it wasn't economically viable for long periods. Sellafield is the site of Europe's worst nuclear accident – the 1957 Windscale fire, that led to the atmospheric dispersion of radioactive materials throughout England, Wales and northern Europe. Sellafield has been a nuclear waste dump since 1959 and has been called Europe's most toxic nuclear site, a 'bottomless pit of hell, money and despair'. It's a reason Scotland has been dubbed the 'cancer capital of the world'. That's a hell of a track record. Richards blamed high electricity bills on the UK's failure to build more nuclear plants, claiming nuclear was the reason France had lower bills. Wrong. Nuclear power has never been economic. It requires government subsidies and there's no solution for radioactive waste disposal. French energy bills are lower because France didn't privatise its energy and thus retained the ability to cap costs. The French government owns 100% of Électricité de France (EDF), which runs the Torness plant and the UK's four other operating nuclear plants. EDF should be showing far more concern about the safety of its UK plants. The Torness reactor has 46 cracks in its core which the ONR (Office for Nuclear Regulation) said could lead to a reactor meltdown and the release of radiation into the environment. EDF has extended the life of the plant to 2030. Britain Remade's goal is to get the ban on nuclear lifted and to use the Torness site for new nuclear plants. Whitfield trotted out two pro-nuclear talking points, both of which are easily refuted: 1. Nuclear power doesn't increase CO2. Not so. There are carbon emissions from mining, transporting and processing uranium, from constructing power plants and from transporting radioactive waste to places like Sellafield. By contrast, renewable energy doesn't increase CO2, there's no mining required or toxic waste to dispose of, and Scotland is bursting with renewables. 2. Nuclear power creates skilled jobs for life. The renewables industry also creates skilled jobs for life without shortening it – in engineering, project management, data analysis and renewable energy technologies – and doesn't endanger the health of workers or the local community. Councillor Hampshire, who worked at Torness, said that although he 'had to support renewables', nuclear is needed for baseload power, which is the minimum power level on the grid. Wrong again. Baseload power can be provided by any mix of generators, including variable wind and solar, if constant backup sources like tidal are provided. Furthermore, nuclear can't be easily switched off, so when it's present on the grid, much cheaper renewables are limited, which raises costs to the consumer. Nonetheless, councillor Hampshire said he was lobbying hard for more nuclear power. He wants two Rolls-Royce SMRs (Small Modular Reactors) at the Torness site, claiming they're cheaper and quicker to build and said that many SNP MSPs support him. I wrote about SMRs in February, showing they are more expensive than and just as dangerous as large nuclear reactors; will generate more radioactive waste and will turn communities into de facto long-term nuclear waste disposal sites. Only two SMRs are operating in the world – in Russia and China. Both are performing at less than 30% capacity and have been plagued by cost and time overruns. According to the World Nuclear Industry Status Report, these problems 'make it even less likely that SMRs will become commercialised.' Despite these facts, councillor Hampshire vows to include SMRs in the next ELC Local Development Plan. We were told that a lot of work is going on behind the scenes to ensure Torness remains an active nuclear site – with the UK having to import energy, otherwise. During the Q&A, Whitfield was asked what it would take to change Scotland's position. He replied 'a change of government' and questioned whether Scotland has the authority to ban nuclear power since energy policy is reserved to the UK. It does because the Scotland Act 1998 devolves planning to Scotland. Nevertheless, Whitfield said this could and would be tested through the courts, although he later clarified there were no definite plans to mount a legal challenge to Scotland's authority to ban new nuclear power. English Labour are pushing for more nuclear because they're funded by the industry. The industry expects a return. Nuclear power is another issue crying out for direct democracy, where the Scottish people – not special interests who are in bed with the politicians – have the power to decide via a referendum whether they want it or not. There are many other issues, local and national, over which the Scottish people have no control – pylons in the Highlands, corporate tax haven 'freeports', the closures of Ardrossan Harbour and Grangemouth, the Loch Lomond Flamingo Land development, to name just a few. If we're to stop special interests always crushing the interests of the people, we must demand our international human rights. That's why Respect Scottish Sovereignty (RSS) is urging as many as possible to sign PE2135, to enact the Direct Democracy/Self-Determination Covenant (ICCPR) into Scots law. Leah Gunn Barrett Edinburgh
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Explore the Wicked Isle in the upcoming DLC for a popular Cumbria-based game
Travel to the Wicked Isle and explore the mysteries of Midsummer in the upcoming story expansion for Atomfall. Game developer Rebellion has announced the first DLC for its hit game Atomfall that will expand the story and open up new potential endings for the main game. Atomfall takes place in a fictional version of Cumbria five years after a nuclear disaster - the 1957 Windscale Fire - led to the area being locked down. The new DLC, set to be released on June 3, will draw on the game's folk horror elements. Read more: "Midsummer is located close to the Windscale Atom Plant and as a result the levels of infection in both the people and environment are higher than on the mainland,' explained Ben Fisher, Head of Design at Rebellion. "You are going to meet new enemy factions including pirate bandits and infected druids. To help you survive there are new weapons to be found on the island including a devastating Blunderbuss shotgun, a new bow, cutlass, daggers and the Beekeeper's Staff. "You will also be able to acquire new skills which will aid you on your quest as well as an upgraded metal detector which will enable you find even more loot caches."
Yahoo
01-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
You Can Finish Atomfall Pretty Quickly, If You Rush Through The Wasteland
There have been quite a few games over the years that examine the fallout of a nuclear event, but developer Rebellion's new title Atomfall distinguishes itself by using a real-life accident as the basis for its tale. Taking place in an alternate reality following the Windscale nuclear disaster of 1957, this UK-based survival-action experience provides a large open-world experience with plenty to do and see in a radioactive England. Here's how long it'll take you to see what Atomfall has to offer. Atomfall is an open-zone game that gives you a lot of freedom in how you approach its narrative. You can follow along with the quests given to you by various NPCs, or you can choose to slaughter everyone in your path and figure things out for yourself. Moreover, the game doesn't do a lot of hand-holding, so you'll need to spend a lot of time paying close attention to details,studying your environment to find important items and locations. All of this freedom helps make the overall experience of Atomfall fairly unique for each player. As such, each person's playtime will differ based on how they approach the story and the options available to them. Because choices and ingenuity play such a large part in how long the game can last, it's somewhat difficult to say exactly how long it will take someone to beat. Generally speaking, though, if you're the kind of person who doesn't venture too far off the beaten path and plans to just focus on pushing through the narrative beats of the game, you're likely to get anywhere from 10-20 hours out of your journey through Atomfall—again, largely depending on which choices you make along the way. But, if you're looking to see and do everything Atomfall has to offer, you'll be able to squeeze quite a lot more out of this post-apocalyptic outing. Doing as much as possible in a single run can easily score you many, many more hours of gameplay than a strictly narrative-focused outing. And if you're looking to grab every trophy/achievement in the game, you'll need to beat it various times while following different paths. You'll even be rewarded for finding a way to complete the game in under five hours! There's a ton of replay value in Atomfall, so you'll be able to play through it as many times as you'd like while always seeing something new. This choice-driven, post-nuclear survival game is available on March 27 for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, and Windows PCs. . For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
The Guardian
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Atomfall review – everybody's gone to the reactor
'What if the Chornobyl disaster happened in the UK?' is the question Atomfall asks. The answer, according to developer Rebellion, is that it would be considerably more picturesque and feature loads of pasties. Aping the nuclear catastrophe fiction of series such as Fallout and Stalker, Atomfall offers a mildly diverting scientific whodunit. But it struggles to muster the same clear identity of the games that inspired it. Using the 1957 Windscale fire as its launchpad, Atomfall thrusts you into a postwar Britain where that accident was dramatically worse, prompting the government to send in the army before walling off a large portion of the Lake District, sealing everybody inside. Your character, an archetypal video game amnesiac, awakes inside the exclusion zone several years later. To escape, they must unravel the mystery behind what caused the disaster, who is responsible and how to fix it. This mystery, and how it unfolds, are by far the most interesting parts of Atomfall. The story reframes conventional quests as 'leads', where points of interest are revealed by collecting documents such as letters and military reports, and speaking to the surviving locals in the zone. At the heart of the enigma is a vast underground research facility, which you must reactivate by unlocking its entrances and locating atomic batteries to power its various sectors, ultimately unlocking the heart of Windscale and the dark secret kept inside. It's a tale that offers plenty of intrigue. The characters that assist you on your journey, including soldiers, scientists and a publican, have their own motivations for doing so, which you'll only uncover by cross-referencing them with other players in Atomfall's unspoken game of zones. These will often relate to diversions you'll find along the way, such as infiltrating a castle occupied by Wicker Man-style druids to retrieve a special medicine and solving a quintessentially British murder in a church. Unpicking these threads is fun, and the tale benefits from a tighter focus and better pacing than most open-world adventures. Unfortunately, the accompanying game mechanics feel as if they turn up more from obligation than enthusiasm. Combat lets you choose between guns that are serviceable but unremarkable, and melee fighting that will make you appreciate every rusty firearm you collect. There is a rudimentary crafting system you'll mostly use to make bandages and the occasional molotov cocktail. A stealth system exists in theory, but perhaps fittingly I never saw it function in any meaningful fashion. Enemies can spot you from half the map away and seem telepathically connected to nearby allies, which makes sneaking around awkward and unrewarding. It probably doesn't help that it's always a bright sunny day in Atomfall's exclusion zone, which would be unusual for any part of the UK, let alone the Lake District. On the whole, it could make better use of its Cumbrian setting. Although Atomfall's four maps are lavish and fun to explore, including craggy valleys filled with shells of dry-stone buildings, and the most meticulously recreated English village since Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, the world is not especially atmospheric. Moreover, the enemy factions, druids and crazed marauders clad in cricket gear, feel like vague attempts to anglicise the kooky gangs of Fallout. Where are the feral ramblers, the roving bands of literati fighting over whether Wordsworth or Coleridge was the better poet? Why are pasties so abundant, while Kendal mint cake and Grasmere gingerbread are absent? This may seem flippant, but given we have recently seen such a brilliant lampoon of northern life in Thank Goodness You're Here!, Atomfall's own depiction of the north, and indeed Britain in general, feels superficial and haphazard, a jumbled assemblage of cultural touchstones. To use another example, one of Atomfall's key inspirations is Stalker, a series whose strength lies in how it is so specifically, uncompromisingly Ukrainian. Stalker and its sequels are completely unafraid to be weird, bold, challenging and bleak, to wholly envelop the player in its nation's radioactive trauma. The UK simply doesn't share that trauma in the same way, so Rebellion's 'what if' scenario can only ever be a shadow of Chornobyl. Atomfall is out now, £45
New York Times
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Atomfall's Nuclear Disaster Has a Toxic Element: Tedium
Atomfall, an open-world role-playing game set in the verdant English countryside of the mid-20th century, is hampered by questionable design choices that made me wonder if I'd fallen into a time warp and was playing a spiffy-looking game from 15 years ago. There are narrative tropes, flat characters and unimaginative enemies everywhere. The latest game from Rebellion — an Oxford studio best known for the Sniper Elite series — spins an alternative history around the 1957 Windscale fire, the worst nuclear event in British annals. The fire, which affected one of the two nuclear reactors in the Cumberland area of northwestern England, released radioactive material into the environment, but the disaster was downplayed by the British government. It's a small irony, then, that Atomfall opens with newsreel footage that depicts the British military cutting off contact between the area around the reactor and the outside world. I can't say that Atomfall's opening inspires confidence. At the start, my unnamed character is roused from a cot inside a bunker by a scientist in a hazmat suit with a gaping wound to his side. In response to my character's obvious confusion, the scientist hastily sets the scene: 'You're trapped in the quarantine zone around the Windscale atom plant. That's where it all went wrong.' In the mythology of the game, the Windscale incident followed a top-secret scientific discovery. But may we all agree that at this point in video game history, an amnesiac protagonist should be included only if there are a number of mind-melting payoffs queued up? Soon after emerging from the bunker into the bright light of day, in the manner of the Fallout games, I encountered a group of outlaws who told me to back away lest there be trouble. Perhaps if they endeavored upon an actual conversation I wouldn't have resorted to the ol' ultra violence. But everything about them signaled that they were disposable, forgettable antagonists. I made my way to Wyndham Village, where military personnel patrol the streets while the locals tend to their affairs. The nonplayer characters, who provide texture and memorable moments in stronger role-playing games, are here little more than tiny founts of information with a splash of personality to stretch them into one-dimensional beings. At a country house, I encountered a doddering lady who asked me to find her missing servant. After I discovered and relayed the servant's fate, she told me that I could be a replacement. That ha-ha revelation and some generic loot gained from reaching a previously locked-off part of the estate's grounds was one of the game's ho-hum quests. A bulk of Atomfall's main story line involves restoring power to a secret government facility called the Interchange. (Yet another overused plot device I could happily do without.) The first time I encountered one of the ferals — the blue zombielike enemies who lurk there — I groaned inside. They struck me as generic, not scary. Moving deeper into the facility I encountered what looked to be possessed scientists in hazmat suits who were far more difficult to kill; they followed me through tight environments with a tenacity that reminded me of Mr. X in Resident Evil 2. I found them, in addition to some of the robot enemies that patrol the Interchange, marginally more interesting to spar with. That said, the artificial intelligence of enemies can be easily manipulated. My favorite thing about Atomfall is its suite of accessibility options, which allow you to fine-tune your experience at any point. On the recommended setting, the player must rely on a compass to navigate; this can be tweaked so waypoints for objectives are shown on the map, the only way I avoided checking out earlier. From its lackluster opening until the 25th hour, I held out hope that Atomfall would eventually satisfy — but to my dismay, it never did. I should have just stayed in the bunker.
