Dear Alan

Re your very good article “Neither Nuclear nor Renewables” in Feb-Apr Eco-News. I think you have made a serious error. You say “To replace all fossil fuels with nuclear in the UK would need about 400 nuclear stations.”

I assume you mean all electricity generation to be nuclear. You will know that in the past approx 20% of nuclear generation came from the dozen or so Magnox stations and the 2 or 3 AGRs then on stream. Therefore 100% nuclear electricity generation would require 40 or 50 nuclear stations. (Of course individual power stations would theoretically be bigger in the future so probably less than 40.)

It is a pity that doubts can be cast on the validity of the rest of your arguments (which I am sure are right) by the above apparent error.

Geoff Locke

Response

Thanks Geoff for pointing out that my article was not clear. I agree with your estimate of 40 nuclear stations to generate all our electricity. Even 40 nukes is probably more than we could build because of the lack of good sites and a world shortage of uranium.

But we also need to replace all the gas and oil we use for heating and transport. Some say we could do this with nuclear electricity, using hydrogen for transport generated by nuclear electricity. To do this would need around 400 nukes.

Alan Pinder

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