There is news today that Électricité de France (EDF), Europe’s largest energy producer may be about to make a takeover bid for British Energy plc, the UK nuclear power provider.

Électricité de France produces 22% of Europe’s electricity mainly from French nuclear reactors, some of this energy is already exported to the UK.

The UK has aging nuclear power stations, some of which are scheduled to go offline soon and there is projected energy black-hole. The UK government dragged it’s feet for 10 years up until the last few months when they finally decided that nuclear power would be needed to keep the country running.

If British Energy plc were to be sold, the UK government would give up it’s stake so potential energy export revenue for the British from new reactors sited in the UK may be limited.

Possibly the only chance for avoiding the energy gap in the United Kingdom is the purchase and deployment of quick-assembly modern nuclear reactors from France.

On Saturday we took a trip over to Sywell Aerodrome in Northamptonshire for the 2008 Sywell microlight fly-in. Unfortunately, only a few aircraft attended, probably due to the nasty weather which included sporadic hail and a stiff breeze. Almost all of the attending microlights were 3-axis affairs with just one two-person flexwing in attendance.

Sywell is an all-grass runway airstrip but has just been granted planning permission for a hard-surface runway to allow for winter operations. Inevitably, this runway surfacing has attracted a group of NIMBYs with too much time on their hands who have been protesting the change of surface. I have very little sympathy with such NIMBYs, especially when the aerodrome has existed since the 1920s and used to handle far, far larger (and noisier) aircraft than it does today.

The Greek registered ship ‘Ice Price’, a 6395ton bulk timber carrier destined for Alexandria in Egypt is tonight adrift 35 miles off Start Point in the English Channel.

Some of the 5258tons of timber has reportedly broken loose and shifted leading to a 25 degree list. The Maritime and Coastguard Agency expects that the ship will capsize later tonight.

Twenty crew members were rescued by Portland Coastguard helicopter, one of whom had a broken leg and the final eight were taken aboard the Torbay lifeboat. HMS Cumberland was in the area and offered assistance and French Coastguard tug Abeille Liberté is en-route from Cherbourg.

Should the Ice Prince capsize and disgorge it’s timber load into the channel, I image it could create an awkward problem for navigation as the timber spreads across the surface.

Photo Credit: MCA

Updated: Matt has been by and posted a comment here pointing out that my comment on his blog was most likely in his moderation queue. Looks like I’m at fault here so sorry about that Matt. (I thought I saw the comment in-line so I thought it had passed moderation)

Original Post: Yesterday, a post marked as ‘twenty-four’ popped up in the Wordpress dashboard leading to a post on PhotoMatt’s blog indicating that it was his birthday.

Seeing that I knew Matthew Mullenweg was the founder of the Wordpress platform, I thought I’d take a moment to wish him happy Birthday in his comments section. You can imagine my disappointment when I today discovered that the comment has apparently been deleted

I suppose it’s possible that there is an issue with the comments system or that he had to restore from backup somewhere in the meantime. I do sincerely hope though that my comment was not interpreted as spam when it was only meant with kind regards.

Looking back through the delusionofgrandeur.co.uk server logs, I was impressed to discover that we have been visited by somebody using a Nintendo Wii games console.

The Opera web browser is available for the Nintendo Wii (for a small fee)

This comes after we were hit by a Sony Playstation 3 in November (we actually had another PS3 hit in December too).

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like I can ‘collect all three’ because, as far as I know, there is no web-browser for the Microsoft Xbox 360.

World Famous New Zealand mountaineer and explorer, Sir Edmund Percival Hillary has died at the age of 88. Sir Edmund was internationally renowned as the first man ever to reach the summit of Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world.

Sir Edmund had been experiencing a decline in his health since he suffered a fall in Kathmandu and was subsequently hospitalised upon his return to New Zealand.

Sir Edmund conquered Everest with sherpa Tenzing Norgay in the expedition of 1953. According to wikipedia, his first words to his friend and fellow mountaineer on his descent were:

“Well George, we finally knocked the ******* off.”

In the following years, Hillary climbed no less than ten other Himalayan peaks and even visited the South Pole.

He will undoubtedly be remembered as one of the greatest explorers to have lived. I hope that the human spirit of exploration does not die with him.

Image Credit: Graeme Mulholland