U.K. Nuclear Update

The piece by Max Hastings supporting nuclear energy in yesterday's Guardian (U.K.) that we linked to is getting a lot of play on the newspaper's letters page:

Putting new reactors at existing sites would speed the planning process, enable the use of existing power lines and reduce site acquisition, management and security costs. Using off-the-shelf designs and a rolling programme, starting where reactors have already closed, would reduce construction times and costs. Hastings' vision of life in 50 years' time neglected to explain that by then power will probably be from clean fusion reactors. He also did not mention that much of this country's stockpile of nuclear waste comes from past military programmes. A replacement generation of nuclear fission power stations would add only 10% to our existing stocks.

Steve Bolter
Gestingthorpe, Essex

What the reader describes above is more or less what the American nuclear industry is doing today, and it's a model that the U.K. could emulate quite easily.

Here's another reader that's not quite as sanguine:

Hastings would have some credibility if he offered to have a nuclear power station near his house. From where I live I can see two nuclear power stations, the chimney of an oilfired power station and two wind farms. There is no doubt which are the most beautiful as well as the most environmentally friendly.

Norman Lamond
Rothesay, Isle of Bute

I guess this conclusion depends on just what you consider to be environmentally friendly -- and nuclear energy's clean air benefits are pretty clear.

As for coal plants and wind farms being more visually pleasing than a nuclear power station, there are more than a few folks in England, and elsewhere, that believe that wind farms are a blight on the landscape.

While doing research for this post., I came across a quote from former U.K. Energy Minister Brian Wilson where he comments on folks who are fighting the deployment of wind farms in the English countryside:

People must take a balanced view and we must act collectively. If we are to have a serious renewables industry, we must be able to drive forward projects without them being blocked for years, sometimes on unreasonable grounds.

While he might be talking about wind farms, he may as well have been talking about nuclear power plants. And I think that its important to point out, once again, that we don't oppose wind farms or the development of any renewable energy source. But we do need to realize that NIMBYism can have an impact even on renewable energy sources that environmental activists tout as a magic bullet to the nation's and the world's energy needs.

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