Nuclear delusion

There is great danger in the nuclear folly that Pobl Cymru ought to be fully aware of. Participation in England's misadventures have cost us dearly in the past and bring unhelpful legacies. These are minor compared with the nuclear waste already littering our country, and the proposed expansion of nuclear facilities that England wants to roll us into. And the Welsh Government does not speak for us! The short-term threat is two-fold - first, the Nuclear Police have immense power (without accountability, natch) and the new facilities will see larger areas of our country enclosed in high-security cordons. One can imagine what this might do to our freedoms in Cymru... Second, with such a substantial stake in Cymru, would the English actually permit Annibyniaeth? Worse, what would be the point if our country was so tightly bound within the New English Super State? If you support independence for our country, we must all resist the nuclear menace and reject the hyper-industrialisation of datacentres, blue hydrogen, carbon storage (an expensive joke) and the continuing exploitation of our resources, our land and our people. Cofiwch Dryweryn! Cymru rydd!

The author brings up that mining is very dirty and heavy on CO2 emissions... but there's no other alternative. To make the steel necessary for wind turbines, solar panels... dirty mining is needed, to produce the batteries for electric cars... dirty mining is needed (in copious amounts). As for uranium mining in the UK, while as far as I'm aware it is no longer happening, it has happened in the past, see the South Terras mine in Cornwall, which close less than 100 years ago and it's possible to extract uranium from seawater. Which, last I checked the UK has abundant access to: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44221-024-00346-y (it's renewable, unlike land mined uranium which might run out in approximately 4bn years). Yes nuclear power stations take a lot of resources to build, but once they're in place they provide nuclear power for many years without CO2 emissions (the current problem) they are a net benefit to CO2 emissions over all. The nuclear waste problem is not as much of a problem as the author appears to claim, lets clarify, nuclear fuel is solid when it goes into the reactor and it's still solid when it comes out of the reactor. It's then stored somewhere safe... it doesn't and cannot (due to being solid) leak, most of the incidents of contamination are due to contamination from say earth quakes and water. Spent nuclear fuel can, in fact, be recycled, France does this and there are designs of advanced reactors to further exploit this 'spent' fuel to power more reactors. We no longer have to bury and forget tonnes upon tonnes of nuclear wasted (which could be safely stored down no longer used mines).

Yes it costs CO2 to mine uranium, as it does with extracting coal, gas, and oil. It costs CO2 to build the power plants, as it does with coal, gas, and oil. Nuclear energy is clean at the point of use with two by products of steam and nuclear waste. Steam is much less harmful than acid rain or oil spills decimating ecosystems, and the waste gets buried in the ground in a container in an area the size of a tennis court.

The biggest problem is time. Hinkley was announced in 2010 and is expected (hoped) to be online in 2031. 21 years. And that's using tried and tested technology, not unproven "experimental" SMRs. In half that time we can solve the storage problem and power everything from limitless renewables.

There are various emerging technologies which can reuse waste from nuclear power stations. There are alternatives to uranium in nuclear power - mainly thorium, which is under active investigation by China. There are very few activities which do not release some CO2 into the atmosphere - breathing is one of them. The fact of the matter is that any advanced industrial civilisation which requires huge amount of power to make its electronic (e.g. AI) systems run reliably cannot depend upon wind and solar. These must be developed further and put into use wherever possible. But for steady baseline electrical production nuclear is essential now and will be more essential in the future. Fusion power won't save us: there is no indication it will ever work. There are indeed delusions - but the belief that nuclear is not needed is one of them.