RE: The Nuclear maths dont work
Why is it that whenever a Greenpecker gets on his moral hobbyhorse and starts fudding nucleur, they can never actually provide any sensible maths to back up their arguments? I've seen all types of male bovine manure figures plucked from the air by Greenpeckers that all fall to pieces under scrutiny.
"....To run a large-scale grid of the sort currently in use, you need to be able to produce huge amounts of power every second of every day...." Yes, nukes can do that, every day, reliably. Wind can't, tidal can't, and solar (in the UK at least) can't.
".....Tot up the total energy content of the fossil fuels needed to mine and refine uranium and urn it into fuel rods...." You mean ignore the market price for Uranium, which is what we actually pay as we don't mine Uranium in the UK? Can I also ignore the total energy that goes into fossil fuel extraction? How about the fossil fuels used in producing windfarms and then maintaining them? Most windfarms seem to be out in the middle of nowhere, requiring lots of trucks for daily maintenance. And that's big trucks with heavy-lift cranes. And then you have to build the roads to get to the windfarm sites, seeing as they tend to be out in the hills. Of course, if we had a massive number of nukes, we could simply switch to battery-powered diggers and the like for extracting the Uranium, and nuke-powered ships to transport it, and even use nuke-derived electricity to write articles to educate people like you.
".....and to account for a share of the energy cost of the inevitable accidents...." How many accidents? IIRC, the British nuke power industry still has a lower accident rate per worker than any other energy source in the UK! And yes, that includes people injured in the work building windfarms (which, by the way, will also have to be "decommissioned" when they wear out). I can't really compare to solar as, in the UK, it;s such a trivial enterprise as to not have any figures available yet.
"....It’s very difficult to get that much power that reliably by any means other than burning a lot of fossil fuels..." Male bovine manure! Nukes have been doing it for years.
Once again, I direct you to the case of France, which doesn't seem to have had a problem funding their nuke industry, and is now a net exporter of energy. We in the UK could have been at least as well prepared for the end of fossil fuels as France, if the politicians had ignored the hippies and built more nuke stations, it's as simple as that. I suggest you go back to IndyMedia or wherever and leave the thinking to the adults.