Just What the Greens Ordered?

Maybe not, but the terrorists...

It's been decades since any new nuclear power stations were built in the UK. There was always so much controversy - no-one wanted one in their back yard, especially since Windscale (one of the earliest ones, built to provide nuclear material to keep the UK in the nuclear arms race) almost had a meltdown. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl didn't make anyone like them any better. People are scared of leaks, and worry about the disposal of nuclear waste. You don't need weapons grade plutonium to make a dirty bomb, so any old rubbish will do for a terrorist bomb. The more stuff there is in the world, the more difficult it is to police, the more likely it is that someone will get hold of it for their own nefarious purposes.

But the politicians who control the building of power stations and other methods of producing electricity have left it too long before they made any decisions about filling the energy gap the UK will have in a few years time. They know that new nuclear power stations will not come on line soon enough, but they have decided that this is the answer to greener, cleaner electricity, carbon-emissions free. Being able to cover half the UK in radioactive fallout is obviously greener than trying to speed up the construction of wind and wave turbines at sea. They've learnt safety lessons from the past apparently. Take this example:

This is Dungeness Nuclear Power Station, photographed from the garden of the late movie director, Derek Jarman. This is an extract from the Wikipedia entry on the power station:

On December 31st 2006 the A Station ceased power generation. It is anticipated that defuelling will be completed by 2009, the turbine hall demolished in 2010 to be replaced by an intermediate level waste store in 2014. The waste store and reactor building will then be placed on a care and maintenance basis until 2103, with final site clearance and closure by 2111. Decommissioning is estimated to cost £1.2 billion. An alternative proposal has been made to accelerate cleanup for completion by 2030.

Over a hundred years to clean up the site! It closed more than a decade after its proposed life span. What's more, the headland on which it is built is unstable and subject to catastrophic change in severe storms. It's happened before. There has been a long succession of lighthouses because the coastline keeps on moving. Every single day of the year, huge trucks move tons upon tons of shingle back along the coast to Dungeness from Rye Harbour, where it has been washed by the previous day's tides. Without this, no doubt the power station would long ago have been engulfed by the sea. Radioactive fish stocks, yummy!

Anybody out there think they'll make better decisions about where to place the "new generation" (yes, they call it that without any idea of the pun) of nuclear power stations? Especially as, on this crowded island, finding a site away from dense populations is almost impossible, even if you don't mind spoiling sites of natural beauty or wiping out the last population of some almost extinct orchid.