nuclear plants, are they good for britain?

[dodamaksoud]

as above, i believe that this will help britain, in japan they have nuclear plants and because of that reason they have been provided with enough evergy to be the most advanced country in the world and every precaution has been made to prevent accidents which percentages are far too low to have even a probability of occuring britains well being is only in mind i think. what do you think?

[Loosehead]

if it helps here's last weeks discussion on the subject:

http://www.theanswerbank.co.uk/News/Question169506.html

[metagirl]

thing is, until an accident occurs or some poor shmuck in the future has to deal with degrading nuclear waste storage facilities, it appears like a very good idea.

Poor Shmuck.

[Ralph]

I find your link between the prosperity of a country and the quantity of electricity available in that country to be laughable. Don't take it personally, I just chuckled when I read it. I think that government policy will do more to foster innovation and investment in high-tech (or otherwise) industries than the number of power stations and the amount of power those produce.

Personally, I think the next generation (or interim solution) of power stations should be gas fired. Even if you include price volatility and increased taxation on carbon emissions, it will work out very favourable compared to nuclear fission.

Nuclear has hazards that while small in probability, are immense in difficulty if they come to pass. The decommisioning costs are not included in the price per kilowatt-hour calculation and will be picked up by the taxpayer. The waste is the most frightening and long-lived toxic mess that the best we can do with it is bury it out of sight/ out of mind. The stations themselves would make an exceptional target for a terrorist with an aeroplane. While the existing ones maybe already do, why do we want to give them more targets of the worst kind?

While gas may be a hydrocarbon, it emits half the carbon of oil for the same energy production. Those big gas tanks aren't actually a good terrorist target as the IRA found out when they tried to bomb one (it didn't work). Why not take on an interim solution and invest the money that you'd save by not going nuclear to invest in fusion and hydrogen fuel cells and all the other "green" power sources?

[funnywebsite]

We need to use the free wind that is around and solar power. Yesterday I was out feeding the ducks and because I was standing in the sunshine it felt so warm. If we all had solar power panels on our houses we could collect the heat and heat our houses and hot water this way. For days when it is windy, we can use the free wind to generate energy.

[jake-the-peg]

No offense funnywebsite but you really ought to look at this more carefully than how it feels when you're feeding the ducks!

At our latitude current solar technology is not very attractive - you need it most in winter when you get it least!

And you'd need 20,000 wind farms to supply all the country even if it was windy all the time!

Just a small correction about fusion - it's not totally clean, the reactors are bombarded by significant levels of neutrons and this does result in radioactive waste in the decomissioning. But there's no waste fuel, no Plutonium and by careful use of materials you can bring the half life of what you decomission down into the sort of timescales that can be sensibly managed.

However we have a gap of about 30-40 years to fill and I don't know enough about gas and Uranium reserves to hold a proper opinion on the nuclear/gas option.

My worry is those making the decision don't either