Never Mind, We'll Just Change the Name to Sellafield

The Oxford Research Group has produced a report into the safe, cheap, clean, sustainable, cuddly potentialities of nuclear power. The report calculates that "for nuclear power to make any significant contribution to a reduction in global carbon emissions in the next two generations ... the industry would have to construct nearly 3,000 new reactors - or about one a week for 60 years". It is doubtful whether even the Reverend Tony's plans were quite so ambitious as that. In addition, stocks of uranium are likely to run low enough within the next twenty-five years that a further new generation of reactors will be required to cope with the shortfall. As an added benefit, this "will ... add immensely to the amount of weapons-grade plutonium being produced" because the new reactors will be fuelled with "plutonium ... of a type suitable for use in the most efficient nuclear weapons". Since the greatest expansion in demand will be in the world's poorest countries, then if nuclear power is to be the answer to our cheap, clean and cuddly energy problems, nuclear power will have to be operating in such cheap, clean and cuddly countries as Bangladesh, Congo, Indonesia, Nigeria and Pakistan, as well as in the nine potential examples of freedom 'n' democracy in the Middle East which have "expressed interest in civil nuclear power".

Fortunately, the report will be of no interest at all now that the British Government is "consulting" (or, in Standard English, spreading its legs and waving the public exchequer at respectable corporate citizens) on the unmitigated wonders of a new generation of safe, cheap, clean, sustainable, cuddly nuclear power stations whose decommissioning they won't have to pay for.