The Guardian has a long piece on the possibility of a new generation of nuclear stations. Predictably, some concentration on the long term residual radioactivity.

Even 2103 will not be the
end for the most radioactive waste products. Most likely they will,
mid-century, be buried deep underground, somewhere in Britain. They
won’t be safe for a million years. A million years is a long time for
humans, who live on average for 80, and governments, which live for
four, to be making plans over. A million years ago, our ancestors were
in Africa, and rival species of mammoth clashed on the English tundra.

A million years? Tchah! Given the way half lives work used fuel rods after 3,000 years are less radioactive than the uranium ore they came from. True, you still wouldn’t want to gind it up and put it on your food but a little proportion here, eh?

Then, in 1986, came
Chernobyl. One of the reactors at the plant in the Soviet Ukraine
exploded. The fire, death, destruction, contamination and evacuation of
the immediate area around the reactor was horrific enough. But what
most shocked Europe was the reach of the invisible plume of radioactive
particles that rose from the fuming hulk of the reactor. The accident
was only admitted by the Soviet authorities after the radiation was
detected in Sweden; the invisible cloud spread across central Europe,
across France, and contaminated the hills of Britain. Invisible – but
it cast a shadow over nuclear energy in Europe that has still not
lifted.

Might be useful to mention why the shadow has not lifted, eh? Those reports of hundreds of thousands of deaths….when in fac tthere have been a couple of hundred recorded ones and there might be, at the outside limit, 4,000 in total over the next generation. You know, fewer than get killed by coal fired power stations every year?

Ah, my apologies, he does mention it:

No system is foolproof.
Yet even the world’s worst civilian nuclear disasters so far can be
unequivocally linked to fewer than 100 deaths from radiation. Of 134
people who suffered massive doses of radiation in the immediate
aftermath of Chernobyl, for instance, 42 have died. Yet scientists have
failed to find a higher instance of one of the major radiation-induced
cancers, leukaemia, in families living in contaminated areas of
Ukraine, Belarus or Russia. Although hundreds of children in these
countries have suffered non-fatal, but extremely traumatic and
life-altering, thyroid cancer as a result of Chernobyl, these cases
could easily have been prevented had the Soviet authorities not
displayed a degree of callousness and incompetence that it would be
hard to imitate.

This is odd:

Despite the effort on
all sides to show that the debate isn’t wind versus nuclear, there are
occasions when conflict breaks through. Parker likes to show you a
report by the economics consultancy Oxera stating that a set of new
nuclear power stations would cost about a third as much as "the £12bn
cost of the renewables programme".

In
other words, wind power expensive, nuclear power cheap (in comparison
to wind). But Oxera’s methodology has been challenged. It ignores the
tens of billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money which have been spent in
developing and cleaning up after the nuclear industry over the past 50
years, and ignores the rate at which wind power technology is becoming
cheaper – to the point that, Tony White warns, government action should
be considered soon to stop the owners of onshore wind farms making
"superprofits".

Including past sibsidies and costs? They’re sunk costs, we ignore them. We’ve already paid them and whether we build new nuclear or notmakes no difference to the fact that we already have. They are therefore ignored in discussions about whether we should build new nuclear or not.

Actually, a much fairer account than I would have expected in The Guardian. A good one to read if you’re interested in the nuclear question.