Greenpeace on the roof

My problem with nuclear is two-fold. Firstly, the enormous cost of clean-up. I'll take your word for it that, dealt with properly, the waste is fairly benign. However, last year, a report by the National Audit Office came out suggesting that it will cost £73 billion to decommission the UK's old nuclear sites. I think this is staggering - and surely suggests that nuclear is too expensive. (That's just the clean up, not the building of the plants, running, etc, etc).

Source is here if you're interested - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7215688.stm

Then there's the sticky politics surrounding the plants themselves. The government may want to start building new reactors around the UK, but the length of time it'll take them to get through the planning stages (years and years of local residents' objections, etc) let alone build times means the UK will hit the looming energy gap with barely any new nuclear plants, no real investment in renewables, and no North Sea gas to burn in our gas-fired plants!

An answer to your first point:

In the nuclear section ‘Economics of cleanup’ you are correct that the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority has an annual budget of around £2bn for the next 25 years. However, some 65% of this will be spent on cleaning up Sellafield in West Cumbria; this has never been a significant power generation facility and the vast majority of the clean up costs are associated with legacy wastes associated with plutonium production for weapons in the 1950s and 60s. Therefore, the costs that you quote are in reality not quite such a ‘hefty subsidy’ as your estimate. The current generation of stations also claim that they have been designed for decommissioning (therefore will be cheaper to decommission) and their higher operating efficiencies will produce less spent fuel waste per kWh generated.
Thank you very much for this correction. Coincidentally I also received exactly the same information today from another source, who told me in great detail what a mess the Sellafield weapons site is!

from http://beta.metafaq.com/faq/mackay/wha/ (a Q&A site relating to the links below).

I agree with your second point, but serious change is coming one way or another, we need to start working now and hard to shape it.

This is the book. I was on about.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/30/david-mckay-sustainable-energy

Woo hoo! Another fan! I'll repeat the direct link to the author's website where you can read it for free: www.withouthotair.com

I think this is a seriously awesome book. It answers many of the questions raised in this thread, it gives you the tools to work it out for yourself, it is impressively even-handed, and it is so clear and readable. I cannot recommend it enough.