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It seems to me that the waste particularly leaves us with a pollution problem as big as landfill sites, can a serious environmentalist be in favour of nuclear power as a result of that problem?
Well, Lovelock is, and he's pretty much the definition of 'serious environmentalist'. Clearly, it would have to be a stopgap. What's not clear to me is whether that's actually a practical measure - obviously, if you ask the industry, they say yes. But the cost of Nuclear is debatable, and the ability of the industry to supple a large additional amount of power within the time frame is unclear - at least to me. It looks more as if any new power stations would be starting up around about the time we'd like to be phasing them out.
And then there are the security/safety considerations.
Against that, of course, is the possibility that nuclear research is something we need to pursue for other reasons - science, space travel, whatever. And everyone would still like to see usable fusion. Well, a lot of people would.
What I feel about Labour's position, specifically, is that I don't trust it. I don't believe Blair is capable of standing up to a serious lobbying effort. I fear that we'll be leveraged into adopting NP for the wrong reasons and under the wrong conditions, and at the cost of alternative power sources. Certainly, the industry has a ghastly track record in this respect. Look at Salter's Duck:
In 1985, the first full-scale pilot plant was built in Norway and produced electricity at 4p/kWh. However, in the same year, the UK Government cancelled all research on wave power. The reason for this action was a secret report, produced by the Advisory Council on Research and Development which recommended saving the £3M being spent on research. At that time £200M was being spent on nuclear research. Indeed, the nuclear lobby and Government, were pushing for the Sizewell B nuclear power station, and were afraid that cheap wave power would undermine the nuclear programme. Thus, wave power had to be stopped. Evidence pointing towards deliberate ‘dirty tricks’ came to light in 1990, indicating a clear policy from Government and the nuclear industry to make wave power seem more expensive. Some of these devices included: deliberately altering the views and conclusions of the consultant engaged to assess the technology; ‘adjusting’ certain figures to make construction costs appear fifty times greater and the reliability of the transmission cables seven thousand five hundred times less reliable; postulating very low resource availability (Prins and Stamp 1991). . |
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