Some people sigh away Chernobyl by saying it happened so long ago. It is a mere twinkling of the eye. If the Romans had built Chernobyl, and it caught fire and spewed its caesium over Europe at the time of Christ, we would still be tending the sarcophagus over it today, two thousand years later. Ah, say some, we would use a different reactor to those Russians...but it didn't stop Harrisburg/Three Mile Island having a problem. It didn't stop General Electric trying to build reactors in the third world, in places like major earthquake fault lines...go figure.

The greenhouse costs of nuclear energy are enormous, mainly because their productive time for electricity is nothing compared to the cost of construction and the cost of decommissioning the reactors and the thousands of years of waste.

All of these facts are inconvenient for those who want to sweep away the dangers of uranium, the nuclear fuel cycle, and the threat to security. But there it is. Wishing the problem wasn't there, doesn't make it go away. Ask the people of Nova Zipcov, who have to use a geiger counter to check their vegetables are not irradiated, and who cannot return to their forests for 10,000 years...only look at photos of them pasted to their concrete walled homes, because their irradiated wooden homes were too unsafe.

Let's have the debate...but it's interesting how newspapers will only print one side of it.

I am not so sure that the technology has moved on a lot. Computerised control systems certainly have but the nuclear part of engineering was dropped out of uni courses in the 80's and a lot of the related skills are being lost. A friend's father in the US was a tradesman in a "nuclear bomb factory" he was recently brought out of retirement to show the younger generation how to machine the uncommon metals used in that industry into the shapes required by the equipment.

30,000 years is a very long time to store waste, if we factor in that cost will nuclear energy still be economic? The swedes build a very fancy waste repository near Stockholm. Will they need to move it due to rising sealevels.

The rising oil prices are forcing us to reevaluate the energy we use. Nuclear energy should be included in such an evaluation. But we should also include the cost of polution, global warming and storing waste products. As these are not readily measured in dollars and we live in a political climate that does not invest in the future I fear they will be omitted.

Electricity from nuclear fission is not a viable solution to our energy problems. Milne is correct in pointing out the inherent dangers in the technology, which are accentuated by the fact that no matter how advanced the containment systems are, they are still dependent on human operators. Can they be trusted to perform adequete maintainence, be correctly trained, employ correct safety schemes, protect the equipment from malicious damage, and admit to their own mistakes? The answer cannot be yes, because humans are not like that.

Furthermore, there may be as little as 15 years left of high-grade uranium left to be mined (probably closer to 50, but still finite). Not to mention the considerable expense of energy in extractiona and refining of the ore, which puts lie to the claims of environmental friendliness given to nuclear power.

And finally, the extreme cost of plant construction, operation, insurance, maintainence, regulation, inspection, refuelling, reprocessing, waste disposal, and eventual decomissioning. Pro-nuclear advocates always talk about how safe a modern reactor is. They seem to ignore how outrageously expensive such a reactor is.

The debate isn't a choice between coal and nuclear power. There are many alternatives, from gas to geothermal to wind, tidal, wave (probably the least well known, but possibly best alternative source), and many more. Connected with grid storage and demand reduction, there is no need for either coal or nuclear.

Science, medicine and engineering/industry all have a need for a scientific nuclear program (ala lucas Heights), but for mass electricity generation, nuclear power is not the answer.

I have copied the following two tables from the Royal Academy of Engineering web site. The cost of generating electricity-Acommentary.

Table 1 summarises the cost of generating electricity for the different ‘base-load’ plants
considered by this study.

Gas-fired CCGT 2.2
Nuclear fission plant 2.3
Coal-fired pulverised-fuel (PF) steam plant 2.5
Coal-fired circulating fluidized bed (CFB) steam plant 2.6
Coal-fired integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) 3.2

Table 1 Cost of generating electricity for base-load plant (pence per kWh)
(CCGT) = constructing combined-cycle gas turbine

Table 2 summarises the cost of generating electricity, with and without the additional cost of
standby generation, from the selection of renewable technologies considered by this study.

Without With
standby standby
generation generation

Poultry litter-fired bubbling fluidized 6.8 6.8
bed (BFB) steam plant
Onshore wind farm 3.7 5.4
Offshore wind farm 5.5 7.2
Wave and marine technologies4 6.6 6.6

Table 2 Cost of generating electricity for selected renewables (pence per kWh)

By this analysis nuclear generation of electricity is cost competitive.

There is some information that is not generally known about Chernobyl.
My source of this info was at a conference on nuclear energy in Vienna at the IAEC, later the UN organistion, in 1956.

At the conference the Russians presented a paper on the power reactors they had designed.

In the Q&A that followed it was pointed out to them that there was a design problem with the graphite moderators. The graphite stores up energy and under certain circumstances is released suddenly and could boil the water cooling.

It appears that the Russians knew better but this was exactly what happened at Chernobyl. I am told that no western reactors are of similar type. Whether the Russians have done something about it I have no idea.