Didn’t you see the

nuclear is especially interesting ‘cos it’s become a “splitters” faultline for the “movement” as Mark Lynas found out.

However rational a choice it is, I am continually disappointed by clearly shoddy management – even if the leaks/fines etc are low level (back-office) process stuff, they shouldn’t continue to happen. There was one in the 90s where the pipebridge had been leaking for years – that’s not safety/env. mgmt. The industry needs to recognise the old “clean table tops in the aircraft signal better maintained engines” thing.

And as the Editors have commented to you elsewhere there’s then the whole weapons bit, complicated by the current terrorism meme.

Peak uranium is a despicable hoax put forward by Storm van der Leeuwen, the head of the Club of Rome in the Netherlands. (The Club of Rome – that charming organization which suggested that human population must be reduced to less than one billion…)

His “study” (paid for by Europe’s Green Parties) was full of deliberate mistakes, listed below:

1. No breeder reactors (either Uranium-238/Plutonium-239, or Thorium-232/Uranium-233)
2. No reactors capable of burning unenriched uranium (like the CANDU or the Magnox)
3. Enrichment using the obsolete gaseous diffusion method (as opposed to the centrifuge method, which uses about 100 times less energy).
4. Vastly-overestimated energy requirements for mining low-grade uranium ores (about two orders of magnitude higher than reality). The amount of energy which Namibia’s Rössing mine would consume according to Storm van der Leeuwen’s calculations, is larger than that consumed by the entire country of Namibia in reality.

M. King Hubbert (who coined the term “peak oil”) had this to say about nuclear energy:

There is promise, however, provided mankind can solve its international problems and not destroy itself with nuclear weapons, and provided world population (which is now expanding at such a rate as to double in less than a century) can somehow be brought under control, that we may at last have found an energy supply adequate for our needs for at least the next few centuries of the foreseeable future.

George
What about peak uranium

From yesterday’s FT article about BP:

“At some point, however, the shift in the world’s energy system will come. Lew Watts, an independent consultant, says the future will bring growing electrification, including of transport. “What we are likely to see, and are already seeing, is that energy will continue to de-carbonise and will ultimately move to the electron,” he says. “Any energy company of the future will need to be in the electron or power business. Companies that do not do this become merely commodity suppliers.”

“merely commodity suppliers” – as opposed to what – a luxury good? Clearly electrons are fungible – the very definition of commodity.

Coal is responsible for too much pollution (both noxious gases and ashes). Oil and gas are too geographically concentrated, which leads to despotic “rentier” governments in the oil-and-gas producing lands, as well as wars fought over the resources.