A bright nuclear future?

I think I recall blogging about a number of these. Worth revisiting if you're beginning to think 'what the hey; surely nuclear must have a place at the table?' A bright nuclear future: true or false? | Jeremy Leggett | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk Here are some of my 'favourites':

This July, a heatwave shut a third of French reactors, because rivers became too hot to act as coolant. France was forced to import electricity from the UK.

6) Things got little better as winter approached. With almost one third of France's reactors out of service for maintenance and other reasons, France will have to import electricity at peak hours during the winter – for the second year running – to avoid the risk of blackouts.
...There were 1,767 leaks, breakdowns, or other safety "events" at British nuclear plants between 2001 and 2008. A Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII) report says about half were serious enough "to have had the potential to challenge a nuclear safety system".

9) A radioactive leak, undiscovered for 14 months, was found at Sellafield just before a visit by the prime minister. A board of inquiry concluded the leak went unnoticed because "managerial controls over the line were insufficient and there was inadequate inspection". Meanwhile, elsewhere on the site two containers of highly radioactive material went missing. The operator said it was most likely that "the anomaly lies within the accounting procedures".

Now while some of those are fixable, I'm still left concerned that human error or mismanagement could be a factor when the stuff we're talking about is so scary ...