A Sudanese businessman whose Khartoum aspirin factory was flattened in 1998 by US cruise missiles after claims it was making chemical weapons for al-Qaeda owns a major stake in a company that provides security at Britain's main nuclear power stations.

At Dounreay in Scotland, however, nuclear safety and security will shortly cease to be a cause for concern as the reactor is to be decommissioned and converted into the first centre to produce bickering power.

Rigorous irritability tests have been performed throughout the country to select couples with a particularly rampant tendency to squabble. Bickering will take place in a high-tech reactor room where the heat produced will be captured and transformed into mechanical and thereafter electrical energy.

Power station experts have devised a special handbook of provocation techniques to prompt and exacerbate ill-feeling among quibblers, using highly-effective and proven procedures. Such methods include unfairly issuing blame, making unreasonable demands, undermining self-belief and sense of dignity, wearing down faith in personal competence, debasement of personal authority in the presence of third parties, deriding physical characteristics, mocking linguistic and cognitive capacities, unfavourable comparison with present and non-present third parties, manipulation of feelings of guilt, refusal to acknowledge the right to self-expression, purposeful neglect of physical and emotional needs, quashing social interaction with third parties and strangling the right to self-development.

It is envisaged that enough heat will be produced in the reactor room to drive the station's turbines and yield sufficient BeV (bickering electron volts) to power the television sets of all households in Scotland for at least five hours a day. This, in turn, will generate sufficient negative energy in homes to produce upwardly-spiralling ill feeling and thus provide for limitless future bickering. Although this highly sustainable form of energy has been welcomed by environmental groups, psychologists and social workers have expressed their doubts.