23-04-2018, 10:12 AM
Regarding Ref's points about transport costs, this has been a problem since the inception of power stations but was dealt with in a simple but efective manner - by building as many power stations as possible on coasts and navigable rivers.
Take the Thames, for example: apart from the former Battersea power station, there were also Bankside, Northfleet, West Thurrock and Tilbury to mention a few. The reason? Water transport was - and probably still is - the cheapest way of transporting coal. One vessel could haul a string of barges from the coal mines in the North East down to the Thames in massive quantities at very little unit cost.
This should not, of course, be confused with the practice of building nuclear plant on the coast, which is done for entirely different reasons.
On the subject of nuclear, now that they are no longer an excuse for producing weapons grade products, I don't see why there is still so much hostility to them. The half life of the most dangerous by products can be measured in fractions of a second so that they degrade rapidly. The low level waste can be encapsulated in small amounts in glass and used as ballast in road building, for example, where the radiation producing element is so thinly distributed that the level of radiation is far below anything that could be vaguely considered dangerous to life - unlike the granite areas of this island that give off copious amounts of Hadon gas with radiation levels significantly above the danger limit. Yet I haven't heard of hot spots like Cornwall becoming becoming open wasteland ...
Take the Thames, for example: apart from the former Battersea power station, there were also Bankside, Northfleet, West Thurrock and Tilbury to mention a few. The reason? Water transport was - and probably still is - the cheapest way of transporting coal. One vessel could haul a string of barges from the coal mines in the North East down to the Thames in massive quantities at very little unit cost.
This should not, of course, be confused with the practice of building nuclear plant on the coast, which is done for entirely different reasons.
On the subject of nuclear, now that they are no longer an excuse for producing weapons grade products, I don't see why there is still so much hostility to them. The half life of the most dangerous by products can be measured in fractions of a second so that they degrade rapidly. The low level waste can be encapsulated in small amounts in glass and used as ballast in road building, for example, where the radiation producing element is so thinly distributed that the level of radiation is far below anything that could be vaguely considered dangerous to life - unlike the granite areas of this island that give off copious amounts of Hadon gas with radiation levels significantly above the danger limit. Yet I haven't heard of hot spots like Cornwall becoming becoming open wasteland ...
