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Heh - the 'vision' and the reality

A narrow vote but an important one and a good outcome. From the London Daily Mail:

Nuclear ban reversed as Swedes build new reactors
Sweden's parliament has overturned a 30-year ban on building nuclear reactors.

The legislation will allow construction of up to ten from next year to replace the ageing ones that still produce 40 per cent of the country's electricity.

The vote was passed on a majority of two, with 174 voting for and 172 against.

Efforts to combat global warming have led to a revival of interest in nuclear power. Countries such as Britain, Italy and Finland are also planning to bring new reactors on line.

Opinion polls now suggest most Swedes favour keeping nuclear plants.

But the vote does not necessarily secure a future for the country's reactors.

The centre-left opposition, currently running neck and neck with the ruling centre-right in polls before a September election, will rescind the new law if they win the vote, said Tomas Eneroth, Social Democratic spokesman on energy.

In 1980, Swedes voted in a referendum to phase out existing reactors by 2010.

Fears of nuclear power were then heightened by the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. In 1997, however, the Scandinavian country scrapped plans for a phase-out of atomic energy, citing the need for cost-effective power for its large manufacturing and processing industries.

The Chernobyl design was a failure waiting to happen and the idiot who precipitated the meltdown was not qualified to be at the controls, let alone running any "safety tests". The Three Mile Island "disaster" was a perfect example of a system which performed perfectly. There was a vanishingly small amount of radioactivity (less than from an airplane ride) and all of the safety measures worked as they needed to. I know I keep harping on this but nuclear is the only source of energy that makes sense. There are abundant sources of fuel, there are new reactor designs that are intrinsically safe and the spent fuel storage issue is a non-issue as the fuel is only dangerous for a few hundred years instead of the tens of thousands with a water-moderated uranium reactor. But of course, Greenpeace was there "demonstrating" their utter lack of science and their willful stupidity: Odd that the nations that Obama holds up as examples are finally coming to their senses and realizing that the green renewable energy scam is just that, a scam. Spain and now Sweden. Posted by DaveH at June 26, 2010 7:22 PM | TrackBack