What about France?
Wonder if attitudes will change after the incident in France today?
Despite the massive and often neurotically inaccurate Western media coverage of the Fukushima nuclear accident, British public confidence in nuclear power has increased. In a poll by Populus for the British Science Association, 41 per cent of respondents said the benefits of nuclear power outweighed the risks – up 3 per cent. …
Just to keep the ball rolling...
The green adgenda simply does not scale adequately. Wind farms, geothermal, solar, biomass, hydro etc. All very laudible, and each useful - if only in in a geographically limited scope. Each however has its own geographic or economic issues. In all honesty I personally see no real evidence that these, in combination, will meet the future energy demands of a rapidly growing and developing global population, at a price that all current and future nation and individual consumers will be able to afford.
Parts of the green agenda are based on falsehoods or incomplete science - and in the case of the *cough* IPCC - often both. For example we now know that the IPCC climate models are - in very simple terms - wrong. Real science has now proven that solar forcing, as one example - as used in IPCC climate models - is grossly understimated. [Link: [Warning. PDF] http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1102/1102.4763v1.pdf].
If the greens can advance their adgenda based on factual science and science that has no politically predefined/preferred outcome then I wish them well. Until this time however, the green agenda cannot be taken seriously as a global proposition.
If I were a greenie, I personally, would stop bleating about nuclear and concentrate on whining about fossil fuels and those darned American polluters.
I do not believe for one minute that confidence in Nuclear Power has gone up. Who did the survery BNFL? Who wrote this article the Atomic Energy Agency. Flattering people to make them look more intelligent than someone else is a NLP tactic. The end result being you sell them an idea by making them feel good about themselves. Not me, nuclear fuel is dirty, I mean really dirty and not article, especially one that is not scientific, will change my opinion of this.
Polls are a joke. I remember a poll in Italy about nuclear power in year 2009. The outcome was that Italians were 51% pro and 49% against.
Then there was a referendum in 2011: 95%+ said no to nuclear power. An avalanche.
I usually take any poll with a grain of salt. For surveys on this subject a recommend a spoonful.
Do you mean something like Flue-Gas Desulphirisation - fitted to a few, but not many of our old coal plants. In which case, it fails in terms of doing nothing to abate CO2, or the loss of radon into the flue gas, or uranium and other radioactives into the fly-ash.
If you mean something like an amine Carbon capture system, as is due to be trialled at Longannet, then that can onoly stop about half the CO2 production, at the cost of a £billion or so per station, and decreasing fuel efficiency by about 10%. And it still lets the radiation sources go into the atmosphere or the flue gas.
If you mean something like a Integrated Gasification System, you're talking about something with about the same capital cost as a nuclear station, which burns between 40% and 60% more fuel that a conventional coal plant of the same size, and hence puts even MORE radon, urnaium and so on into the atmosphere.
Take your pick.
"more rational British attitude towards nuclear issues (than e.g. Germany)"
On the other hand, one could point out that Germany in general has a better technically educated, and arguably a better informed (through their not-just-tabloid not-just-celeb-obsessed media), general public than we have here in marginally numerate celeb-obsessed Blighty.
But that wouldn't suit your case, so I won't.