Your comment is highly relevant Graham regarding nuclear(power)for Japan when they have come to rely upon that source of power.

An extract from a paper.

How clean is it?
We learn that nuclear waste has to be stored for 100,000 years. Yes, it takes that long for high-level radioactive waste to break down. Storage areas for this waste are very expensive and take up huge amounts of space. Is nuclear power cheap? England's first nuclear power plant has stopped producing energy. But the decommission process will continue for the next 120 years. The plant produced energy for only 47 years. Now people have to work there the next 120 years to deactivate it and clean it up. That is simply part of the what nuclear power means. – Torness Nuclear Power Station

After meltdowns the work begins for the next hundred odd years.

The costs involved in the clean up process over another decade, far outweigh benefits for 30% of electricity generated using an estimated 54 power plants.

What of the soils, land and contamination over the next 100 years - 100,000 years in relation to nuclear power plants placed into the disused basket? Some iodine is great for soil yet toxic in high doses.

These power plants defeat the purpose environmentally until most people use public transport [rail or non-fuelled vehicles], chemicals and smoke from sources emitted into the air daily are ceased or reduced along with most of the other causes we know exist are not addressed here and around the world.

Curmudgeon,
If you are in the book writing mood I have a subject for you to explore.
AGW is a 50 year time frame problem, at least in the mind of the believers.
Peak Crude Oil is now history since 2005.
Depletion is expected from approx 2015 +- 3 years.

Here we have two major problems with quite different timescales.
A book that enquires into the markedly different responses by
government to these problems is surely worth while.
The book could question whether the government has its priorities right.

The book could also reflect on the effect of one upon the other.

Carbon of itself is not pollution.

The problem is when there is TOO MUCH Carbon.

Plants also only take up Carbon 12 and much of what we produce is Carbon 13.

This wasn't discovered by Al Gore a few years ago. This has been known and observed for decades and it's the reason why the IPCC was created in 1988 once it could be measured effectively and it was shown to be true.
Even Ronald Reagan admitted it as fact.

If you want to be played for suckers by the Marshall Institure and its acolytes to keep the Coal, Oil and Gas multinationals rolling in cash then go ahead. They've done it to you before with passive smoking, DDT, acid rain and the ozone hole but this time there's a financial cost.

Just don't keep claiming it as being an on-going debate where the science has not been settled. Re-quoting already discredited "evidence" as being fact is not enough no matter how often it's done.

G'Day, Qld. especially, is exporting Co2 and this will increase with the possible opening of mines/gassification of coal on the Darling Downs. Who pays for this export of C02? Residents put up with the coal dust, the pollution of aquifers, noise of coal trains, etc. Yet, the Qld. govt. does misuse the royalties it receives from coal exports!

Bazz - while I think you for your book suggestions, you do realise that peak oil, as a cause for any real concern, died completely recently? Check out all the stuff on "fracking" on the net. Apparently recently developments have suddenly made huge shale oil deposits commercially viable.. particularly at current prices. also lots and lots and lots and lots of natural gas.

May well be some intermediate problems as they switch over from easy-lift to unconventonal oil, but that's all the original peak oil forecasts were about anyway.

Certainly don't agree the peak was in 2005 - I was always a "late topper" - but it doesn't matter now.

wobbles - quite interested in your C12 C13 thing - you know they measure the concentrations of those isotopes in the atmosphere and track them? These show that industrial CO2 is increasing in the atmosphere but the unfortunate part is the actual proportion. There are estimates that industrial CO2 makes up just 4-5 per cent of CO2 in the atmos.

Now this issue has been studiously ignored by the global warming fraternity. You won't find anything denying this, or much confirming it. The IPCC 2007 report doesn't really say anything much on the point at all, although reading the atomic signature to work out concentrations should be simple, the report doesn't give a figure from the atomic signature.

A Norwegian scientist Tom Segalstad has been spruiking this point for years but has been ignored. He has also been spruiking the point that it had been confirmed endlessly in the refereed scientific literature, before the onset of global warming science, that CO2 had a life in the atmospher of about five to seven years.

All very strange, as you will agree.