Sunday, 9 July 2006

You still know best Tony


The energy review, to no one's surprise, has concluded that nuclear power is now economic. How could one possibly know? In order to make that determination, you need to know how much it costs to decommission a nuclear power station and store the waste. The former is tricky: you are estimating the cost of a complicated piece of engineering thirty or more years in the future (and we all know how costs tend to escalate with big engineering projects). But the latter? We aren't talking 30 years. We are talking a million, or at least until we figure out how to make nuclear waste less radioactive. How on earth do you estimate secure storage costs for that long? And if you can't, is it not reasonable to conclude that there is no way one can decide whether nuclear power is economic or not?

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