The future is green, the future is nuclear

From The Sunday Times

Professor David MacKay, the government’s chief scientific adviser on climate change, has said what many people have long believed. You cannot meet Britain’s future energy needs and reduced carbon emissions without a big expansion of nuclear power.
As we report today, he believes we should aim to be producing four times the amount of electricity from nuclear as now. Alternative energy sources such as wind, solar and wavepower will never provide more than a fraction of the country’s energy needs. Relying on gas, coal and oil, with an increasing proportion imported, does not square with Britain’s international climate commitments.
The case for nuclear is set out in accessible detail in Professor MacKay’s book, Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air. The average British person consumes 16kg of carbon fuels a day and is responsible for 11 tons a year of CO2 emissions. The corresponding figures for nuclear are 2g of uranium and a quarter of a gram of waste.
Professor MacKay thinks that setting light to gas for the purposes of heating homes “should be made a thermodynamic crime”. He insists he is not personally pro or anti nuclear power but either it, or importing electricity produced by solar means in other countries’ deserts, is the only way of making the carbon sums add up. “The fact is that Britain could never live on its own renewables,” he says.
He is not the first to come to this conclusion. Five years ago James Lovelock, doyen of green scientists and known for his Gaia hypothesis, declared nuclear power was the only green solution. “Opposition to nuclear energy is based on irrational fear fed by Hollywood-style fiction, the green lobbies and the media,” he wrote. “These fears are unjustified and nuclear energy from its start in 1952 has proved to be the safest of all energy sources.”
Britain has been moving in the opposite direction, as the government dithered about replacing ageing nuclear power stations. In 1997, 30% of the country’s electricity needs were supplied by nuclear. Now the proportion is closer to 15%, with two nuclear stations due for closure next year and the rest by 2023.
The government is preparing an announcement about a programme of replacements for that lost capacity but has so far gone no further. Professor MacKay believes the country should aim for between 40 and 50 gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2050, four times the present 12 gigawatts. The expected rise in electricity demand, as more people switch to electric vehicles, will make that case even stronger.
These decisions need to be taken soon. Too much time has already been wasted.