Time To Leave The Club

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Just a brief observation on a piece in today's FT. The UK's Sizewell C nuclear plant build is late, over budget, already obsolescent, and with a lifespan of just a few decades, will produce electricity at twice or three times the cost of other generating sectors. Not only that, when finished it will take decades to decommission the plant and thousands of years of waste management to safely store the radioactive materials produced during its lifetime. Not exactly the endless clean and cheap energy that the opening of the Windscale [now Sellafield] plant in Cumbria in the 1950s was trumpeted as heralding at the time; which of course was mere window-dressing to cover up its primary purpose, which was to produce weapons-grade materiel to bring the UK firmly into the Nuclear Club. The fact is that there are far better, less hazardous, cheaper to build and run methods of electricity generation that produce far cheaper energy and last far longer than nuclear. Just on a cost/benefit basis alone, you would think the concept would have been binned long ago...

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