An email from Ben Ruth ...
I sit on the Lancaster Sustainability Steering Group
(a local strategic partnership with Lancaster City Council) and have been providing scientific background to our position paper on the nuclear generation industry in the Morecambe Bay area.
Electricity generation using current technology to fission Uranium 235 is far from carbon neutral. That's not to say it can't be - but it isn't right now. There's the mining, the crushing, the dissolution of the yellow cake / pitchblende with sulphuric acid, the ultracentrifugation to concentrate Ur238 vs. Ur235. And then the transport and the manufacture of the power stations.
That said, nuclear is still a LOT less CO2 emitting than burning fossil fuel - by about an order of magnitude. But it's NOT carbon neutral!
In Lancaster and Morecambe where we have to live with the stuff and the politics it generates the concern for us is quite simply the waste. We're pushing for available technology to deal with the waste we have now at Heysham 1 and 2 power stations and to guarantee proper radioactive waste elimination through a technique called spallation that has been available since the late 1990s but has surprisingly not found it's way into Government mandates for a new generation of reactors - they would rather bury it.
One other point I would add is the possibility that, yes, whatever we do here in the UK won't necessarily halt China and India's surge towards better living.
But deforestation in the Brazilian rainforest is now 30% less in the last 5 years and is back to where it was in 1991. China is developing TWO whole cities with the aim of them being carbon neutral, and without nuclear. The Bush administration's stranglehold on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is being cast asunder. People the world over want change and it's turning the tide in the streets of Tikrit to the poll booths in Des Plaines, Illinois.
So what if Bollington, and Lancaster, and a whole host of other towns and villages in the UK did become 'carbon neutral'? How embarrassing would that be for a Government that hasn't shown much courage when WE show them how to do it. And then, just maybe, most of the world, also thinking similarly might follow suit. And India, China, the Amazon, may become examples. Then, perhaps, we can show the planet what humanity, not apes, can be capable of.
Not in our lifetimes, I expect, but it is POSSIBLE.
