No more nukes, for pity's sake!

Here we go again. The government has given the green light to the French energy company EDF and the Chinese to build a series of nuclear power stations in Britain to replace our ageing stock. They have offered the builders very tempting terms and conditions. They will pay the initial building costs, but will then be able to charge well above the going rate for the energy they supply. Sounds like they are going in for a lot more forward thinking than the government who has permitted this gravy train to be put on the rails.

Don't you find it interesting that this French firm is going to do this over here, whereas their own country is starting to reel back its commitment to nuclear power, just as Germany and other countries around the world have. Most advanced societies have at last concluded that nuclear is expensive, difficult to maintain and potentially dangerous. Plus of course the irritating little problem of what to do about the waste, which we can dump in mine shafts and bond into glass blocks or whatever the latest idea is. At least we don't have to worry about it, but our descendants will, and they will wonder what the hell this generation was thinking when it went down this disastrous road.

When we were flying back from Norway this summer the plane passed over a vast forest of wind turbines sitting out in the North Sea, near the Dogger Bank. Ah! I thought. That's the way to do it. The only way to do wind power efficiently is to do it big, just like this huge wind farm. And it's not even upsetting the nimbys who can't even see it from the coast. What we should be doing is ploughing enormous resources into research into how to make it serve our needs better- and if we didn't spend billions and billions of pounds on what is essentially an obsolete method of power production, there'd be all the money needed to develop wind power, and the array of other sustainable energy production methods currently out there, but currently withering on the vine through lack of investment.