What's wrong with nuclear power..?

Why is the greenest and most reliable energy source not being embraced..

One of the more glaring blind spots of the green movement - other than supporting mass immigration with its increased consumerism, energy consumption and demand for housing - is its opposition to nuclear energy. Running a Nuclear Power plant generates no CO2, so you’d think a low carbon power source to combat their catastrophic man-made climate change hysteria might be something they could get their limp handshakes behind but no. Instead, with the usual intellectual gymnastics and childlike magical belief in renewables, they are opposed to nuclear power.

You have to hand it to the Green movement. The German Greens during their time in coalition closed Germany’s nuclear power plants, causing the country to become more dependent on fossil fuels, notably those imported from state-owned companies in Russia. It might look like a monumental failure until you realise that Gerhard Schroeder, the Chancellor of the SPD-Green coalition government, subsequently went on to work for Russian energy companies Nord Stream AG, Rosneft, and Gazprom. Mmm. Additionally, the Germans evidently seem unaware that a coal power plant gives off at least ten times more radiation than a nuclear power plant.

Anyone supporting green polices should be forced to live with unreliable renewables, candles, heavy jumpers and paper straws for month and see how they vote subsequently. They might decide that a reliable energy source is essential to survival. We now have a Labour party promising nuclear power, despite the 1997 to 2010 Labour Government planning, engineering or constructing not one nuclear power station. It was in the dying days of their tenure in 2010 that Hinkley Point C, one of eight power plants announced to be built, yet remains the only one currently in construction. The Conservatives have continued this legacy of doing sod-all nuclear power development, despite Rolls-Royce developing a versatile next generation Micro-Reactor that can be deployed at pace, at affordable cost and provides safe, reliable and emission free power.

While Germany is sticking its fingers in its ears about Co2 emissions and finding itself dependent upon coal-fired power stations, nuclear power needs to stake its place in the UK low-carbon energy mix to provide a baseline of continuous energy in contrast to the inadequate solar and wind generation, which is rather awkwardly weather dependent. If Net Zero is our governments’ existential conundrum then why the reluctance to embrace nuclear fusion? They should be embracing it with the enthusiasm of a stag-do discovering unattended pedalos on a beach.

15% of the world's electricity comes from nuclear power and the UK has an ageing fleet of five nuclear power plants. It’s unlikely any of them will be open beyond the early 2030s. With the Hinkley Point project now delayed until 2029, this rather dashes the UN and WEF’s, sorry, I mean Starmer’s, plan for the UK to have Net Zero power by 2030. Emily Shuckburgh, director of Cambridge Zero at Cambridge University, sounding like someone being chased by Doctors in white coats, recently claimed that ‘continued use of fossil fuels is a threat to us, our children and their children.’ She was presumably tranquillised before she could expand upon the subsequent power cuts and outages leading to social deterioration from failing food freezers and life support systems, to uncharged EVs and no plastic products that her rabid pursuit of Net Zero wold result in. Emily clearly ha never witnessed children without wi-fi.

So, why this glaring lack of enthusiasm for nuclear energy? There are apparently three main arguments for opposing nuclear power.

Firstly is fatalities and risk. In fact, there have only been two incidents where a large amount of radioactive material was emitted: at Chernobyl (1986), which resulted in 46 deaths, and at Fukushima Daiichi (2011) following a tsunami, which resulted in no casualties. There was also an incident at Three Mile Island (1979) with no detectable health effects on the workers or public.

There have probably been more fatalities from crocheting than from nuclear disasters. Despite the rampant propaganda - and The Simpsons opening credits - of TV series like Chernobyl, complete with Victorian steam-punk masks and collapsing roofs, nuclear power is by far the safest of all reliable energy sources. All viable forms of power generation have risks, and even the unviable ones like wind slaughter birds with cold murder of Stalin on a Kulak shoot. Coal and oil have killed far more people than nuclear.

Greens always claim we don't know how to safely dispose of nuclear waste. In fact radioactive waste can be safely buried in engineered landfills, where they are isolated until their radioactivity declines to the point that it is no longer a risk to human health. That process can take a few hundred years. It can be buried in the same place as Mr Blobby, Mr Tumbles and Westlife records, unseen and undisturbed. The Net Zero and the Green movements prefer 760 wind turbines to replace the single nuclear plant at Mühleberg that Germany is now decommissioning. Meanwhile, solar energy requires roughly 20x more space than nuclear for the same energy generated. The largest solar farm in the US only produces 1663 GWh of energy per year on 3200 acres. Meanwhile the smallest nuclear plant in the US produces 4930 GWh of energy per year and sits on 426 acres.

The third is more prosaic. Nuclear power stations are accused of being huge construction projects involving lots of concrete, steel, energy and environmental damage, which is exactly how you could describe and farms and solar panels. However, they don’t need to be buried in landfill after their 10-15 years of meagre energy production.

To decarbonise the national grid by 2035 (the Conservatives) and by 2030 (Labour) means either closing all our gas power stations or fitting them with carbon capture and storage technology. This is basing something as crucial as energy supply on something worse than the magic money tree. Carbon capture and storage is magical thinking; it doesn’t exist yet and at such cost we might be looking at £5 to boil a kettle. The current unprecedented Net Zero madness is imminently to be revealed, as the complaint public realise that the renewables don't have the muscle to deliver reliable, available and affordable energy 24/7 as effectively as fossil fuels or nuclear power. Dicking around with carbon capture and tying poo bags to the backs of cows will make us the laughing stock of the civilisation that comes after us in the same way we mock nailing toads against walls to ward off bad spirits. The only bad spirits right now are our politicians.

Dependable energy is essential, it’s both actual and metaphorical life support. Wind and solar renewables are the energy equivalent of luxury beliefs, while declining our own natural resources of gas and shale means every splash of oil and fart of gas we don’t produce has to be bought from elsewhere, once Russia and now increasingly the US.

Long after our the historic mystery of our shady countryside is left languishing beneath hail-smashed solar panels, and the sentient wind turbines stand in disrepair like petrified dystopian forests, nuclear power will be quietly and efficiently heating our homes and running the country. Meanwhile, the names of our politicians that so fundamentally failed us will be murmured as dire warning to the dangers in holding political principles over reality.

The UK’s Net Zero Strategy: Build Back Greener legally binding the country to cutting away reliable energy sources in favour of untested, unreliable sources is like jumping from a plane without a parachute in the hope that a decent crash mat will be invented before you hit the ground. How our cross-party politicians have been allowed to do this merits discussion for another day, but in the meantime nuclear is the goose that can keep laying the golden egg; so why the reluctance? Might it be that there’s no money to be made as there is in the £billion green industry?