Interesting stuff, thank you, folks. Just so's you don't think I was playing Knock Down Ginger! ;-)

Unsurprisingly, TANSTAAFL Steve is closest to my own thoughts. More or less the same, really - "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch". Advocates of nuclear power are few & far between. I'm not one, and I don't think Steve is either. But there are also plenty of costs in so-called "green" or "carbon-neutral" or "renewable" energy. Many of those that I've seen, in various media, pushing for renewable energy either are not willing to acknowledge this, or are unaware of it. My purpose with this (apart from starting a blazing row, of course! ;-) ) was to get people to think about the subject.

"Comparisons between the resource usage of nuclear and wind construction are deliberately twisted by the nuclear spin doctors." can equally, as per the above, be thrown back, Jack. Replace nuclear with green. Never the twain shall meet.

And both you & Ake... Oh dear, Ake, I never have been able to persuade you to stop flying a kite, have I, auld son? ;-) I know what you mean, but you again explain yourself poorly, as well as not being realistic. It's all very well saying that Homo Sap should live a less wasteful lifestyle, but it's not going to happen, is it? First, let's dispose of "subsistence" (which word you used, though Jack didn't). Subsistence is dying on a dollar a day. It's spending 95% of your waking hours scrabbling around to keep body & soul together. Knowing that illness, injury, a bad harvest, means you or people around you will be DYING.

So you aren't advocating a return to a subsistence economy. You're advocating Tolkien's Shire - a misty-eyed romantic view of a happy bucolic existence before Saruman & nasty Ted Sandyman started cutting down all the trees and filling the land with smoke... It never existed, Ake, except in dreams. There's always a lot of poor (in every sense of the word!) sods, covered in sod up to the eyebrows, living at subsistence level so that a lesser number can live higher up the scale (the higher up the scale, the lesser the number). The only question is, would you prefer rich subsistence; i.e. first world benefits, minimum wage, zero-hours contracts; or third world subsistence; starve if it all goes wrong.

So you don't mean "subsistence" at all, do you? You mean we all should consume less. But yer flyin' a kite. Just how do you propose to persuade people they should consume less? Half the world lives below, on, or precious little over, a dollar a day. There are no people (as opposed to individuals) anywhere who want anything other than "more". It's a pious thought, but an empty one. Even if world population suddenly miraculously stabilises (which isn't going to happen either), you can be sure that the demand for energy will continue to rise. There's no point in presuming anything else. In pragmatic terms, it's not a question of reducing it, or even stabilising it. It's how the hell do we feed it? Because energy projects take *years* to come on-stream.

Iains - Nuclear, in the sense of fission, is not a solution; it's a stopgap. It was once seen as the former, but it is very definitely only the latter. However, despite all the scaremongering about nuclear, only once has it ever gone horribly wrong, and that was Chernobyl. Which, for various reasons, it is probably safe to say, is unique. Three Mile Island was the most famous nuclear accident before that - no attributable deaths. Calder Hall / Windscale Fire (I assume you mean the latter by the former) - no attributable deaths; 95% of the radioactive release from the pile contained & captured before release to the atmosphere.

I can go on. People fear nuclear, because they imagine a nuke plant turning into a Hiroshima bomb - not possible. Or because they believe, oh, the "anti-nuclear spin doctors", eh, Jack? ;-) Even Chernobyl hasn't turned out anything like as badly as was believed at the time (so far anyway). Apparently 31 deaths were directly attributable to it. Look up Flixborough. Flixborough killed 28 people and seriously injured 36 out of a total of only 72 people on site at the time. Then consider Bhopal. Both got mentioned in my original conversation with Jim. Steve has touched on Aberfan - that killed 144 people, 116 of them children, simply because we (the collective we) couldn't then manage to look after a spoil heap properly.

Yet, for all the industrial disasters down the years; mines, oil tankers grounding, Piper Alpha, chemical plants going up, Buncefield fer crying out loud; it's nuclear that generates more hand-waving than anything. An error of perception, perhaps? An encouraged-by-interested-parties error of perception?

As I said in my opening post, I'm not pro-nuclear. But, frankly, my best hope is that in 30 years our baseload Megawattage is still the same as now; just a much lower proportion of the whole energy demand. Depending on how you view him, Elon Musk is a visionary, a shyster, or deluded. Or something of all 3! I have no idea, myself. I honestly, though, cannot see any energy storage system allowing renewables to take the strain off of the needed "always on" power supply in the next decade. Energy demand continues to grow. And I'm thinking only of Europe, Australasia, S.Korea, Japan, N.America here. China & India long ago made it clear that they expect to be allowed to catch up by means of dirty power, never mind Africa and Sth/Ctrl America...