A Nuclear Future?

As Tony Blair embraces a nuclear new build and pushes aside recent failures to meet reductions in greenhouse gas emissions across the UK, I took a train ride from Devon to Woking to find out if there is a better solution.

I talked to a geology student on the train going to Exeter. She described in detail how the earth has changed over the past million years; how Scotland used to be a volcanic area; how the seas and oceans have shifted and changed, like immense amorphous organisms, over the course of time; how movements in the earth’s crust have created great mountainous areas and deep ravines; how fault lines break open; how the earth's plates collide …

In the UK most of our electricity still comes from huge coal and gas power stations. Drax power station in Yorkshire (alone) emitted 20.8 million tonnes of CO₂ in 2005. The remaining huge power stations like Drax are the monuments to the UK’s centralised energy system…a system which revolutionised the way people lived in the 1920s and 30s, by providing an electricity supply for all homes and businesses. But almost a century later, faced with a global energy crisis and climate change, these power stations begin to feel like...

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