Tony Blair's closed nuke mind

It wouldn't take you too long to work out my stance on nuclear power; a quick survey of postings on this blog would soon tell you that I think that it is too expensive, a standing invitation to terrorists to have a go, an immoral bequest to future generations of problems we can't solve and unlikely really to address climate change within the time scales needed even if it didn't embed so much CO2-generated energy in it's rather-too-slow onstruction.

So you can imagine I'm less than happy about Tony Blair's attempt to soften up public opinion for commissioning new nuke-plants. More frustrating still is that so far the process has been working:

A survey of 1,491 people this year, carried out by Mori and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, found 60% of people would support new atomic power stations as long as renewable energy sources were developed and used at the same time, and 63% agreed that Britain needed nuclear power as part of a mix of sources to ensure a reliable supply.

Thoug more careful questioning revealed that this was a position of last resort: people really don't want these nukes unless there's no alternative.

But 74% said that nuclear power should not be considered as a solution for climate change before all other energy options had been explored.

So the real task is to keep hammering away with arguments like this pointing out that we would be writing ourselves a huge tax bill indirectly via our utilities bills [unless we can make sure that nuke power is properly transparent in costs to the potential consumer, in which case it'll be dead in the slightly warm glowing water]. And if you want a more wide-ranging opinion piece, this one is good; worth looking at the comments too.