A Place to Stand

From comments on Danial Hannan's blog we have this quick summary of all the eco-fascist claims against nuclear. I am putting a quick fisk here in bold because the Telegraph seems to have screwed up comment registration (at least it isn't just me somebody else on there mentions it):

Half of the EU doesn’t want nuclear plants. Their choice, literally no reason it should dictate ours The EU would need hundreds of them and it takes a decade to build just one The implication that it would thus take hundreds of decades to build them is wrong for the same reason that it doesn't take 5 hours to cook 100 eggs. In any case it does not take a decade to build a reactor - Westinghouse say they can do it in 3 years, if it first takes 7 years to let government agree to it that is not inherent & an argument for having reducing the amount of government eco-regulatory parasitism. Not only do they cost a fortune to build they also cost a fortune to take down. No true - the first reactor at Shippingport cost $98 million to decommission & modern ones are built specifically to dismantle more easily. Again we see the eco-crowd vastly inflating regulatory costs & then complaining that regulatory costs are so high The used fuel has to be stored for xthousand years. Not true - reactor waste, precisely because it is highly radioactive burns down to safe levels in 50 years & to less radioactive than the ore it was mined from in 2-3 centuries. The cost of the fuel is going up even faster than oil and gas. So what - uranium cost is a tiny part of nuclear cost, indeed this is why the price is volatile The uranium costs a lot of energy/pollution to extract and process Not true - if it cost as much as coal to extract it would cost as much as coal - once again we see the eco-fascists ignoring the price system & making assertions based firmly in mid air. and isn’t durable either. Obviously not true - uranium has been here since the Earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago - how much more "durable" is required The safety is questionable. Not true. Nuclear has the best safety record of any power system - more people have died falling of windmills that in nuclear power though nuclear generates hundreds of times as much power Nuclear power favours monopolies. Not true - organisational structure depends on how things are organised not on the technology Nuclear power requires lots of expensive engineers and support staff. Staff, & other, costs are far lower per kwh power produced - is it supposed to be a fault that it can produce a lot of power Nuclear power can’t live with renewables because you can’t turn it on/off at will. Wholly untrue - nuclear is a very good match with hydro precisely because you the latter is so flexible which is why France is 80% nuclear & 20% hydro. What the idiot means is not renewables but that it doesn't fit with windmills but since they can't be switched on when required windmills "can't live with" windmills - in fact all this assertion shows is that windmills are completely useless because they can't produce ANY baseload power but only occasional power which, to be used at all, requires genuine generators of all sorts have to be turned off Builders of nuclear plants systematically ask for priority to the net because otherwise they would go bust. The truth is the exact opposite. Builders of nuclear plants systematically offer the cheapest power meaning that a sanely run grid would naturally choose them as first option - Windmillers demand & being politically connected, get priority to the net though they produce the most expensive power. This is what the Renewables Obligation means Enough reasons? Not really but clearly the best the eco movement can do.

For the truth on the subject see Professor John McCarthy's site

Anybody wanting to know about nuclear or indeed the sustainability of progress generally should visit McCarthy's site. As one of the world's leading experts on artificial intelligence his opinions are clearly not those of a fool, which is a change from most people we see on TV lecturing on the subject.

Labels: eco-fascism, nuclear