Nuclear energy for the win

Congratulations, New Labour, you’ve finally proven that you are capable of making a rational, informed and sensible decision instead of pandering to holier-than-thou lobby groups, following political correctness and inflicting knee-jerk policies upon this weary populace that you so often forget have the power put you on the other side of the House of Commons.

I say that without an ounce of sarcasm. It’s perfectly obvious that nuclear power is the only realistic way to generate enough power to satisfy our baseline requirements over the coming decades without further contributing to global warming (sorry, “climate change”). Renewable energy sources have and will continue to have their place, contributing wherever they can to the National Grid, but they cannot hope to generate enough reliable power on their own to cater for our present requirements, let alone future requirements.

There is nothing to fear with nuclear reactors. Everyone who’s against the idea shrieks “Chernobyl” at the mere mention of the word, as if they’ve been programmed to do so by the short-sighted anti-nuclear propaganda that’s been pushed around over the past 30 years. But Chernobyl was a bad reactor. It was of a design that has not been used since and will never be used again. It required a team of technicians to work around the clock to prevent it from blowing up, whereas modern reactors require a team of technicians to work around the clock to prevent them from shutting down.

Three Mile Island is another example used by the anti-nuclear lobby as a reason why nuclear power is bad. But using Three Mile Island in that way is a total own goal. The Three Mile Island incident proved how safe reactors are when something goes wrong. All the safety devices kicked in when the problem was detected and the reactor was shut down. Surely that’s what we want to see? What would they rather had happened?

It’s a brilliant decision, and I don’t say that of New Labour lightly.