Satchel, I wouldn't have a problem with people criticising specific things said by the government, bcos specific things can be proven or disproven (as Blair and Bush are finding out to their cost). But generally saying "the government always lies to us" gets us nowhere. (To drift off-topic, the protesters against UK GM field trials fell into that trap, and were stumped by a flawless government-funded research effort.) By all means, we should check that the government line matches the evidence we know about, but we shouldn't automatically reject a statement just because it came from the government.

Metchosin, "systems failures" for coal-fired power stations must also consider coal mining, which is where the fuel source comes from. Check out Chief Chaos's link, and how many incidents on the list are coal mining disasters.

Incidentally, failure of dams is definitely not unknown (search Google for "dam disaster"). The Shimantan hydroelectric dam in China is apparently the world's worst dam failure, having killed a quarter of a million people. I don't think even the worst estimates for Chernobyl talk about it reaching that number. As a PS, the Three Gorges project shows every sign of repeating the same failures of Shimantan. My previous employer Alstom was bidding for work on Three Gorges, so I got to know a little about it - it scares the hell out of me.

Graham.