Ignore All the Hot Air, Our Future is Nuclear

DANNY Boyle’s weird sci-fi epic Sunshine features a spaceship full of scientists charged with crashing an enormous nuclear bomb into the dying sun, so as to kick-start it and prevent the extinction of humanity. It’s a nice conceit, this inversion of our current apocalyptic fear that a warming world will boil us, but the constant factor is the idea that our salvation may rest in that most minatory of energies: nuclear fission.

The Government’s commitment to build a new generation of nuclear power stations, reiterated in the energy White Paper published yesterday, has already provoked a high court action initiated by Greenpeace.

But they’re not the only environmentalists to doubt the wisdom of the nuclear option. A cross-party group of MPs, together with Friends of the Earth, have attacked the Government for fomenting "political panic" with their rush to meltdown. But then they do the same, by citing the usual nuclear fears: its waste disposal problem, its vulnerability to attack and most dreadful, the hidden subsidies that prop up the industry, dragging investment away from renewable energy.

I agree that the prospect of publicly funding a destructive energy source is woeful. But serious players such as the German utility E.ON say they’re ready and willing to build unsubsidised nuclear plants, without compromising their own involvement with renewables. Lest you think they’re some interloper, these Germans sponsored last Saturday’s FA Cup and have been expanding here for a quite a while.

Let’s get it straight, shall we? If you happen to believe in a serious threat to our economy from climate change and I do then it’s not about to be averted by David Cameron’s wind turbine (or, indeed, any hot air that issues from him).

Unless, that is, you’re happy to

Graters, shards and regress to some pre-industrial lifestyle, with no FA Cups or mobile phones, or dialysis machines, or indeed anything much that requires a national electricity grid.

It’s not that I think nuclear power will stop climate change because it has lower CO2 emissions in my view we’ve already passed the tipping point on that one. It’s that a warming world is going to be a more unstable, chaotic world, with globalisation in retreat. In such circumstances I’d no more depend on Ukrainian natural gas than I would on Dave’s wind.

It’s significant that James Lovelock, the original proponent of the Gaia theory, which led in turn to much of the current understanding of global warming, has been a firm supporter of nuclear for some time now..

and towering egos As to the threat nuclear waste, or malicious attack represent, we’re already hostages to nuclear fortune, piloting a planet that’s speeding through space with an enormous explosive payload on board. At least more nuclear power stations may help us keep our portion of the planet lit, heated and fed. It’s the real bombs that bother me..

BRITISH Land is the latest developer to be seduced by the Mayor’s Graters, shards and towering egos

BRITISH Land is the latest developer to be seduced by the Mayor’s edifice complex into believing that it’s got or, will have the Big One. It’s thrusting forward with its plans for a 47-storey tower block at Leadenhall, to be shoehorned in between Lloyds (the Dyson vacuum cleaner), and the Swiss Re Tower (the Gherkin). Already dubbed the "Cheese Grater", it joins the growing numbers of London landmarks that resemble small, domestic things writ large; or in the case of the forthcoming Pinnacle (a knife-sharpener), and London Bridge Tower (a shard of glass), writ very large indeed.

What is it with this architecture of gargantuan utilities? You don’t have to be Charlie Windsor to think it a shame that our age can only produce buildings whose form is dictated by a dull equation: cost considerations = steel glass..

EVERY night at around 12.30, the men in hard hats gather at Stockwell Tube station like urban miners, about to hack away at a metropolitan seam of gold.

Yet Metronet, the company responsible for most of the Tube overhaul, has already overspent by an estimated Pounds 1.2 billion: these fat cats are crying out that they’re actually very lean wolves indeed.

It’s a vindication for Ken and his former transport tsar, Bob Kiley, who were prepared to go to the wire to stop the public- private partnership being foisted on the Tube. Yet again, the idiocy of a public service being treated as if it were a cash cow for the private sector is exposed.

People bleat on about 2012 being a showcase, but if all that public money can be found to train shotputters in the Potteries, why can’t they fund the system that will do the grunt-work of transporting everyone to Stratford Marshes?

(c) 2007 Evening Standard; London (UK). Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.