We in the glorious Peoples Democratic Republic of Birmingham are capable of the most elementary maths and basic common sense…. which is why we decided that nuclear power was a bad idea, even when it was proposed to be used to address global warming and the amount of carbon generated by conventional power plants.
Firstly the accounting methods used to establish it’s costs were all false as they failed to take into account the massive government subsidies required to build the plants and even more shockingly failed utterly to take into account the costs of deommisioning the plants and then keeping the resulting waste safe the the many thousands of years it would need.
We sat down and did the sums and realised that if you spent the equal sum that it would take to build a single nuclear power plant and instead spent it on renewables then you would not only get enough power but avoid having radioactive waste sitting around just waiting to leak, or be stolen and converted into dirty bombs.
So: what we did is this:
– passed a law that stated that literally NO roof was allowed to be built that was not either a solar roof or at the very least a “green” roof consisting of soil and grass. In the first 3 years of this we paid for these roofs at the rate of 90% of their cost; in the next three years at the rate of 60% and then a final three years at 30%. Guess what? – the costs of installing solar panels fell massively and we got a hugely skilled workforce in their installation and maintenance – and also suddenly between 20 and 30% of all energy was generated right where it was needed! Of course solar power is hugely fickle so we needed to have more than one way of generating power….
– we installed small vertical wind turbines alongside every two lane and three lane motorway: the traffic along them continuously generates wind which we turn into power: during the day these deliver power straight into the grid: at night these generate power for the roadside lights AND power the grid.
– we installed a few very large wind farms in the stratosphere: these provide continual and predicatable windpower
– we powered vehicles with electricity generated from green sources and with bio-fuels.
As a result for the total, real lifetime cost of a SINGLE nuclear power station we are totally powered by green energy. We are almost at the point of being 100% carbon neutal – AND we do not have to store radioactive nuclear waste for over twenty thousand years.