Glance back to the Government’s ‘Energy Challenge’ White Paper of 2006 which promoted the importance of having more nuclear power and you will see that the Government projected that between 2005 and 2015 electricity generation would increase by around 12 per cent. In reality – it has decreased by 13 per cent! Consistently UK governments ignore and underplay the importance of reducing energy consumption, and in their projections, having said a few soothing words about the importance of saving energy (to please our feminine side), revert to the ‘real’ world macho importance of increasing electricity generation. So we achieve energy reductions by hardly trying! Just imagine what could happen if we started our policies by out thinking of how to save our energy! Instead, now we’re seeing an immense shift to please Rolls Royce and the male-dominated engineering lobby who want us to waste money on ‘small nuclear reactors’ (SMRs). Never mind that big ones can’t even be delivered with massive support both sides of the English (-EDF) Channel or indeed that the only reason we got big ones in the first place is that building small ones was hopelessly uneconomic.
Dave Toke’s Blog 20th March 2016 read more »
Roger Bolton asks if Desert Island Discs allowed itself to become too political when it invited nuclear scientist Dame Sue Ion to be a castaway.
BBC 20th March 2016 read more »