Glowing Prospects

Given that the most world-beating nuclear industry in the world has reached its seventh decade without working out how to clean up its own mess, no connoisseur of Britishness will be surprised that the National Johnson has gone all rah-rah for a new generation of reactors. The industry's past glories have left us with some seven hundred thousand cubic metres of toxic waste: the equivalent of two or three modestly-expensed Members of Parliament, with a nearly equivalent disposal cost of a hundred and thirty-one thousand million pounds and rising. The cost of processing waste from the new reactors cannot be calculated at all, because any policy simple enough to inveigle itself into the Johnson cranium has by definition little or no application to the real world. Doubtless a few more welfare cuts will take care of it when the time comes.