Why I believe now is the time for Nuclear!

Why I believe that Nuclear power is the only viable large scale solution to many issues we are being faced with currently in the UK.

As with any piece where I give my personal opinion I really don’t want to mislead anyone (And possibly a throw back to my days as a councillor and making declarations of interests) so I will come out up front and say that as an Employee of EDF Energy, who are a subsidiary of EDF, who create 78% of their power through Nuclear power, I would be a hypocrite if I claimed to be anti Nuclear power whilst happily pocketing my pay check each month. However with the news that inflation in the UK has hit 3.6% for the last month of 2010 I think that we need to really look at why despite the country bordering on recession the rate of inflation seems to be staying stubbornly high. The reason is that this is not Inflation in a way that we can control, this is imported inflation. And in particular Oil driven inflation. Now on the news this morning they mentioned the increases in Fuel and Utilities both of which are very closely linked to the price of Oil (The Wholesale Gas market is based on the cost of Oil) the one thing that does not seem to be mentioned in this is that we will be unable to control our own inflation (if we can ever control it again in a globalized world.) until we reduce I reliance on oil and in particular the OPEC cartel who know that there is a limited amount of time left to make money out of oil – if we Ignore increases in demand, which is something that is highly unlikely with China predicted to double their demand within 10 years, there is around 40 years of Oil left in the planet, if China and India join the US in the 20M barrels per day league (if not more) and Brazil expected to hit over 5M per day this will reduce the oil left to around 25-30 years (And imagine how much those last few barrels will cost.) And this is why we need Nuclear power now, no longer can we try and steer our economy through internal control measures when our economy is tied to the whims of a product of which we are a net importer. Only Nuclear has the benefits of stability of supply tied to being a carbon neutral production. With production of Electricity no longer tied to wholesale prices, the costs of the electricity produced by Nuclear power stations are known in advance, which combined with electric vehicles means that the costs of transport and utilities would only need to be increased in line with the costs of inflation, rather than being a key make up of inflation as they are currently.

Whilst I am a big fan of alternative power generation, One of the best sites I have seen is a field of Solar Panels turning towards the sun in Germany, and I think that wind turbines are really majestic as they swing through the sky, the problems they have is no reliability of supply, and a much higher per KW/H cost to Nuclear. Perhaps some day we will be able to successfully deploy a fleet of Tidal/Wind/Solar generators in the Atlantic to generate all of our power needs until that technology is advanced enough we would need to continue our exposure to oil. Let’s not forget that despite the advances made in Nuclear Technology a planning to generation period for a reactor of ten years has not been unheard of, all this means that if we put of making a decision of for 10 years there may be a good chance that Oil will run out before the new reactors are built, we must therefore (Again this is solely my opinion) build a new fleet of nuclear reactors now and then use the years of guaranteed supply to look for more efficient renewables after this. We could then look to build our next generation of cars and power stations to take advantage of Hydrogen power which is synthesised from water and emits water as the result of using it, but it is a long way off from being a commercial and technical reality.