Monday 16 September 2013

Nuclear Power Staions: Liberal Democrat core vote receives another blow.ow.


Apparently our conference has decided to turn turtle and come out in favour of building more nuclear power stations.  The approval is hedged around with conditions.  A close eye is to be kept on costs and they are not to receive public subsidy. Ha!  Arthur Scargill, the "wicked" Miners' Leader, pointed out thirty years ago that if the coal industry received the same level of subsidy as the nuclear industry miners  could deliver coal to the power stations for free.

I do not claim to be well informed on this issue, and I didn't hear the debate so there may be points I'm missing,  but it does seem to me that, until an effective method of disposing harmlessly of the nuclear waste generated by these power stations, then projects should be limited to small scale experiments.

Right wingers are for ever obsessing about not bequeathing mountains of national  debt to future generations (that is to misunderstand the nature of national debt, but that's another matter):  they don't seem worried at all about bequeathing mountains of nuclear waste to their children and grandchildren, with, as yet, no known effective ways of neutralising it.

This Liberal Democrat decision further reduces the choice available to the electorate, and is particularly damaging to those activists and core voters who have supported us as the Greenest of the major parties.

One final puzzle: why, as a small island surrounded by seas, in which the tides come in and out relentlessly twice a day (and four times in the Solent, if my recollections of Percy F Westerman's sea cadet stories are correct)   are we not world experts on harnessing tidal power? That would be something worth subsidising and bequeathing to the next generation.

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