Honourable Fiend has a compelling take on the recent upsurge in interest in Nuclear power as “environmentalyy friendly” and a good stop gap towards the zero carbon future.

It’s also extremely bad news for the commercial entities which depend on that weapons-power-weapons cycle for their bread and butter. Hence the current US fad idea of building new nuclear power stations “to reduce CO2 emissions while renewables are too expensive”. Which is obviously a complete crock of shit since it’s only cheaper because it’s subsidized to the lug’oles, and it’s only subsidized to the lug’oles because it’s required to maintain a weapons programme. Plus of course there’s the minor issue of waste management.

I worked at Sellafield for a while in the early nineties and there was a certain smugness that must come from being a protected industry. The biggest example of which has to be the THORP programme, which went ahead before the main customer, Japan, had signed any contracts on the understanding that if anything went wrong then the Government would surely underwrite something that had already cost X hundred million pounds rather than risk BNFL collapsing.

Technorati tag: Nuclear Power