Georges Monbiot looks at nuclear power in the Guardian. To no one’s surprise he manages to mangle a few facts and thus reach the wrong conclusion:

The daily discharges from a plant like Sellafield probably kill several dozen people a year. A meltdown could slaughter thousands, possibly tens of thousands.

Well Georges, you really do need to prove that “probably”. People who study such death rates think that the annual death rate from a plant like Sellafield is somewhere around zero, plus or minus zero. By “meltdown” I assume you mean something like Chernobyl. That, as you know killed 31 onsite (yes, 29 of those were killed by radiation). As far as the United Nations has been able to work out there have been a further hundred or so deaths from residual radiation, most of which they ascribe to inadequate treatment of childhood thyroid cancer. So the tens of thousands number seems a bit overblown.

Nuclear power isn’t carbon-free. Mining uranium, and building and decommissioning power stations all use oil, and concrete releases carbon dioxide as it sets. But the total emissions, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, are tiny by comparison with the carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels.

I guess windmills don’t use cement then? Nor oil to set them up or go visit them? Would you care to give us the relative figures? Y’know, so that we could, like, make a comparison? It would also be interesting to know the predicted death rate for building those offshore wind farms….just so that we can compare the human costs. Per MWatt would be the correct way to present them just in case you actually wanted to impart real information.

And it may no longer be true to say that there is no safe means of disposing of nuclear waste. I have just read a technical report produced by the Finnish nuclear authority Posiva which, to my untrained eye, looks pretty convincing. The spent fuel is set in cast iron, which is then encased in copper and dropped down a borehole. The borehole is filled with saturated bentonite, a kind of clay. Posiva’s metallurgists suggest that under these conditions the copper barrier would be good for at least a million years.

Amazingly, this part is actually true. Although grossly expensive. Simple vitrification and burial is good enough to isolate the material for the few thousand years until it is less radioactive than the ore it came from.
Yet despite this, Georges being Georges, he can’t bring himself to actually back nuclear. No, energy conservation is the way to go. Has to be, must be, at least until we develop cheap solar cells.
Sheesh. Nuclear cannot be the answer because it is, well, nuclear, whatever anyone does to reduce or eliminate the dangers. Well done Georges, nice to know you have an open mind.