Conservative energy madness in the UK...

[kristopher]

"This proposal will lead to a subsidised plant creating subsidised fuel so that subsidised operators can produce subsidised electricity and then receive subsidised waste disposal. The only winners in this are the nuclear operators, already rich with their 18% domestic fuel price rises this year."

The government has astonished the anti-nuclear lobby by outlining plans to spend £3bn of public money building a new mixed-oxide fuel (Mox) plant – months after announcing the closure of a similar facility that lost taxpayers hundreds of millions of pounds.

..."This is crazynomics – the reality is that the nuclear fairytale is a nuclear nightmare. Having announced the closure of a Mox plant because it was colossally inefficient and because there was no market for its service, the government now wants to build another one that will fast become a hugely expensive white elephant.

"This proposal will lead to a subsidised plant creating subsidised fuel so that subsidised operators can produce subsidised electricity and then receive subsidised waste disposal. The only winners in this are the nuclear operators, already rich with their 18% domestic fuel price rises this year."

The government has been cutting budgets for solar power, triggering a warning from builder Carillion that it expected to lay off 4,500 staff...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/dec/01/mox-u-turn-stuns-nuclear-campaigners


Background:

Sellafield: the most hazardous place in Europe

Last week the government announced plans for a new generation of nuclear plants. But Britain is still dealing with the legacy of its first atomic installation at Sellafield - a toxic waste dump in one of the most contaminated buildings in Europe. As a multi-billion-pound clean-up is planned, can we avoid making the same mistakes again?

Apparently not...

the article continues:

But the building, like so many other elderly edifices at Sellafield, is crumbling and engineers now face the headache of dealing with its lethal contents.

This, then, is the dark heart of Sellafield, a place where engineers and scientists are only now confronting the legacy of Britain's postwar atomic aspirations and the toxic wasteland that has been created on the Cumbrian coast. Engineers estimate that it could cost the nation up to £50bn to clean this up over the next 100 years.

The figure is, by far, the largest part of the £73bn that has been committed to cleaning up Britain's nuclear-polluted past. It is also an acute embarrassment to the government, which is now anxiously promoting nuclear power as the solution to Britain's energy problems.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/19/sellafield-nuclear-plant-cumbria-hazards



But wait, there's more...

Scottish nuclear fuel leak 'will never be completely cleaned up'
The Scottish Environment Protection Agency has abandoned its aim to remove all traces of contamination from the north coast seabed

Rob Edwards guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 21 September 2011 07.48 EDT


Radioactive contamination that leaked for more than two decades from the Dounreay nuclear plant on the north coast of Scotland will never be completely cleaned up, a Scottish government agency has admitted.

...Tens of thousands of radioactive fuel fragments escaped from the Dounreay plant between 1963 and 1984, polluting local beaches, the coastline and the seabed. Fishing has been banned within a two-kilometre radius of the plant since 1997.

The most radioactive of the particles are regarded by experts as potentially lethal if ingested. Similar in size to grains of sand, they contain caesium-137, which has a half-life of 30 years, but they can also incorporate traces of plutonium-239, which has a half-life of over 24,000 years – meaning that is the time period for half of the material to break down.

The particles are milled shards from the reprocessing of irradiated uranium and plutonium fuel from two long-defunct reactors. They are thought to have drained into the sea with discharges from cooling ponds...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/sep/21/scottish-nuclear-leak-clean-up


"This proposal will lead to a subsidised plant creating subsidised fuel so that subsidised operators can produce subsidised electricity and then receive subsidised waste disposal. The only winners in this are the nuclear operators, already rich with their 18% domestic fuel price rises this year."

Fucking Conservatives.

[PamW]

1. It's the UK Government

The only winners in this are the nuclear operators,
===================================================

Of course in the UK, the nuclear operators are UK Government-owned crown corporations.

The nuclear enterprise in the UK has always been government-owned. First it was the UK
Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA). UKAEA was dissolved and its holding transferred to
British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. (BNFL). Then BNFL was dissolved, in favor of Sellafield Ltd
and other entities, which in 2005 turned into the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.

It doesn't matter what they are called; it's still all the British Government.

PamW

[kristopher]

2. No, it is the nuclear industry.

It doesn't matter how it is organized - for profit or for control by the powerful - the technology itself is too expensive, too dirty, unsafe and its widespread use is an open invitation to nuclear weapons proliferation and nuclear war.

"This proposal will lead to a subsidised plant creating subsidised fuel so that subsidised operators can produce subsidised electricity and then receive subsidised waste disposal. The only winners in this are the nuclear operators, already rich with their 18% domestic fuel price rises this year."

[diane in sf]

3. The Brits are really screwing up their energy future. Someone is making $ off these nuke subsidies

and the general public will be on the hook for hideous sums of money that could have been put into wind, solar, tidal power and other clean and sustainable technologies. When SMUD (Sacramento Municipal Utility District) got rid of the Rancho Seco nuke plant it freed up millions to go back into the local economy. The utility rates for people in that district are about 30% lower than for the nuke infested (around 20% of power production), for profit, PG&E.

[Name removed]

5. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[kristopher]

6. The Conservative govt and the nulcear industry have run a powerful PR campaign

There's a Guardian article about Greenpeace filing a lawsuit against the government for colluding against people who oppose the shift of focus to nuclear.

[bananas]

4. Mushroom farmers love the Conservatives.

Recced this, but still zero.
Conservatives and anti-science pro-nukes treat people like mushrooms,
they try to keep us in the dark and feed us nothing but bullshit.