Cortius

Setting

Cortius is set on the eastern shore, where the coast is cliff and the sea bed drops away close inshore, giving the deepest harbour on that seaboard. The sea holds the winter two to three degrees warmer than the continental interior behind the town, while the rainfall regime remains continental. The cliff above the harbour is undercut by the sea.

History

The Cortius Report of 1968 was an internal audit of the Central Planning Directorate, commissioned by the Directorate itself and suppressed on completion. The print workers who set it printed it anyway, because, according to them, "nobody afterwards could claim not to have known". Article 35(3) now makes the concealment or destruction of ecological data an offence, and Article 61(3) protects the person who discloses it.

Work and provision

Port and coastal shipping, engineering, the eastern regional hospital, the university, and the printing and publishing cooperatives that still have the town's name. The first nuclear power station of the Republic entered service on the seaboard above the town in 1964, and by 1970 fission supplied more than half the electricity of the country. Article 32(6) makes fission transitional: authorisation of a new installation lapses on the day the Ecological Budget Authority certifies that the whole supply is renewable, and installations then in operation are retired on a schedule fixed by organic law from that date.

Government

Elected communal council under Article 141(2), with neighbourhood assemblies in each of its eleven neighbourhoods.