I disagree here on the final sentence. It is a myth that nuclear power is environmentally friendly.
Think about the uranium that is mined in Africa
Well considering the top three producers of Uranium are Kazakhstan, Australia and Canada and produce 64% of the toal supply themselves, not much is actually mined in Africa. (Indeed Kazakhstan alone produces 38% of world supply, almost all produced by InSitu leaching which has no ground disturbance at all, just wellheads <1m high scattered over the landscape)
The primary African producers are Niger, Namibia and Malawi which only produce roughly 16.8% of total world supply. If you go down the list there is only one other African state that is known to produce significant quantities (and that is South Africa which produces huge amounts of everything you can dig out of the ground).
Hell South Africa only narrowly beats the likes of the
Czech Republic.
So attempting to paint this as the west exploiting Africa is absurd.
, the processes the reactors go through to boil water to power a turbine, the radioactive waste that no solution has been found on what to do with it,
The reactor boils the water because the fuel elements get hot and the water boils - it is not really damaging in and of itself.
The radioactive waste 'problem' as it is currently understood is massively overblown as a result of anti nuclear hysteria.
We currently have a perfectly workable solution for spent nuclear fuel (which is the bulk of the stuff people normally imagine when they consider 'nuclear waste').
After ten years in a reactor cooling pond it would then be transferred to a large concrete 'dry storage cask' which has an operating life of approximately one hundred years. (Verified by numerous abuse studies).
These casks will simply sit on a suitable concrete pad almost completely inert, cooling by natural convection and shielding the outside environment from any significant radiation flux.
They require heavy equipment to move or open and can simply be guarded with a pallisade fence and a handful of guards walking the perimeter.
It would take roughly a hundred years of supplying the
entire UK energy demand (gas, electricity, liquid fuels, everything) to cover
one of the runway aprons at Heathrow. Considering the number of disused concrete runways we have lying around this is unlikely to be a problem.
After a hundred years, we remove the fuel, dispose of the cask (which will not be in any significant way radioactive) and replace it with a new cask, repeating the process for another hundred years.
After the second hundred we replace it a second time for the third (and final) hundred year period. Thanks to the fuel being less radioactive the fuel can be more tightly packed with each evolution and thus consumes less volume, reducing the already negligible cost of storage further.
After three hundred years the fuel is only a tiny fraction as radioactive as it was and reprocessing can be conducted using far less expensive precautions than currently required at La Hague or Sellafield. The resulting material will either be reusable uranium/plutonium or fission products, the majority of which will either be stable (As the short lived stuff has decayed to stable daughters) or incredibly long lived (which although it sounds bad actually means that it is not actually very radioactive, similar to the radioactive Potassium-40 that is inside all of us right now) and can be disposed of as low level waste or simply vitrified in glass.
And the cost of all that is still not a significant addition to the price of the electricity.
As long as the money is set aside I see no reason to believe that the management process can be spread over several generations - and it would likely be cut short by advancing automation and similar technology regardless.
the appalling safety record of Windscale/Sellafield
The safety record is not actually that bad, as far as anyone knows, the numerous heavily publicised mishaps at Windscale and Sellafield have not actually ever killed anyone in a way that would not be relevant at any other large industrial facility (a coal mine for example).
Also not really fair to blame the Windscale fire on Nuclear Power since those reactors were designed solely and entirely for weapons plutonium production (and could not be used to produce power in any case as they simply blew air through graphite stacks).
Even so the only significant damage that fire caused to the outside environment was the loss of a couple of weeks of local milk production due to it being seized and destroyed.
and the replacement or construction of new nuclear power stations could potentially make the UK a higher risk of being attacked by madmen on the rampage.
What? Really?
Madmen attack things because they are
mad.
If not nuclear power stations they will simply attack us because of foreign policy decisions, or any other random topic. (Like driving on the left or something equally absurd).
The scientist Helen Caldicott has published various works over the years criticising the credentials of nuclear power.
Ah yes, Helen Caldicott, the greatest hired gun of Greenpeace and the anti nuclear movement.
Most of her works have been heavily discredited, she even managed to drive away
George Monbiot with her insane claims about Chernobyl fatalities.
(Which are now estimated to be from a 50-5000 by almost all bodies concerned, as a predicted cancer peak has now failed to materialise)
On a final point, would you like a nuclear power station in your own back yard?
Yes, it is really a decent neighbour, no particulate pollutants, no significant noise from trainloads of coal going in and out at any time of day, very little risk of fire (As unlike a gas, coal or similar power station there is very little to burn) and no giant stacks or wind turbine columns to blot out the skyline.
It is literally a stubby grey building sitting on a deserted beach or in the middle of a field next to a small group of cooling towers (which can be made rather short as seen
here).
. Probably with new coal-fired power stations all along it - since UKIP appear to believe they look so much nicer than windmills...