1. The plants currently regarded as front-runners for any new build in the UK have never been built anywhere before. The designs are untested and we have no real idea of the construction costs.

2. Any complex system is prone to error or malfunction. When pro-nuke people say that the Chernobyl accident can’t happen again because it was the result of multiple human errors rather than a technical failure, ask them when we eliminated human error.

Thanks for the info – need to read up on this hydrogen business, clearly. And fair play too for reminding us of the non-renewable nature of uranium, something that needs to be pointed out right at the beginning of these kind of discussions – can’t think why it slipped my mind.

The alternative method of producing hydrogen is to pass massive amounts of electricity through water. In other words, create a significant increase in electricity demand.

In my view, proposing “a hydrogen economy” (as many politicians blithely do without understanding the physics and engineering issues) is to propose a sharp increase in fossil fuel usage at a reduced energy efficiency, in the short term. And a sharp increase in electricity demand in the medium to long term which will result in a slightly-delayed rush towards nuclear power as nations try to prop up their expensive new hydrogen economy.

That way madness lies.

There’s another issue you neglect to mention regarding nuclear power. And for me it’s the deal-breaker. Using current nuclear generation technology is merely replacing one rapidly depleting source of energy (fossil fuels) for another (uranium).
>
> [a]t current rates of consumption,
> existing and estimated uranium
> reserves recoverable … are
> sufficient for only about 50-60 years.
> Growth in the nuclear industry will
> reduce this period.
>
http://www.asno.dfat.gov.au/annual_report_9900/nuc_ind_current_issues.html

There’s a frying-pan / fire metaphor all lined up to deal with any switch to nuclear power.

The very fact that such an implementation is unthinkable gives us some idea of the problems nuclear has…..

Anyway – Tom Burke has published a piece that sounds remarkably like yours.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1777223,00.html

It was precisely the question of whether the decommissioning costs are factored in that I was concerned about, though – and yes, of course the incentive in PFI projects is to build quickly, to maximise benefits as soon as possible. But the way these incentives are linked with the incentive of burdening future persons with the costs is precisely the problem.

As far as EdF’s ‘underhandedness’ goes, I believe that they introduced entirely electric heating systems in the 60s, which were incredibly inefficient when supplied by fossil-fuel burning power stations, but which could achieve higher levels of efficiency (though still of course nothing near the communal boilers you mention) if supplied by nuclear power stations. In other words, there was a certain (shall we say) ‘synergy’ between the introduction of this technology and the subsequent nuclearisation of France.

Peter:
They do indeed – but then the French political system, with its colossal centralisation, allows major decisions about the future of the country’s energy supply to be taken swiftly and with a minimum of noisy debate (as indeed happened in the 70s, a tale recounted by Andre Gorz among others). Louis Puiseux, an economist working for the EdF, said then that ‘the all-nuclear society is a society full of cops. I don’t like that at all. There can’t be the slightest self-management in a society based on such an energy choice’. On the strong side maybe, but he had a point: this kind of decision is about more than just numbers. It’s a way of strengthening or weakening a particular kind of political system too.  I think there are good political reasons to be concerned about the wholesale adoption of nuclear power as well as ecological ones.