Er, um, we don't like nuclear power. Let's issue a report.

There's a very loud and shouty report on the front page of today's Independent about the rather unsurprising rejection of a return to investment in nuclear power, by the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC).

Chaired by Sir Jonathon Porritt, the commission trotted out some fairly well-worn arguments - and some quite outrageous ones. The idea that "a new nuclear power programme would send out a signal that a major technological fix is all that is required" and that it might hurt efforts to encourage energy efficiency, is hilarious.

Mind you, he's backed by the Friends of the Earth, which "welcomed the findings".

Odd that.

Given that Porritt was formerly Director of Friends of the Earth from 1984-90. A fact which the Independent, in the effort to publish a balanced and professional story, entirely omitted to mention.

There are also various questions about the economics of nuclear power. Again, fair enough. But arguing about public subsidies, when the suggested alternative (renewables, ie wind, wave etc) is also subsidised, smacks of hypocrisy.

Much of the "sustainability" argument seems to be based on the notion that energy is scarce, and shouldn't be wasted. Which, given that the entire universe is made up of energy (ask Einstein), is about as wrong as any argument could possibly be.

This reminds me a bit of the ongoing battles in my usual domain, the telecom industry. "Bandwidth is precious! Don't waste it! We must be as efficient as possible!". While it is true that certain things are capacity-limited (batteries on mobile phones, for example, or radio spectrum), there is as much fibre to create communications capacity as there is sand to turn into glass. The Internet industry (and to a degree the enterprise networking arena) has long had an unspoken philosophy of "OK, forget the elegance and sophistication and optimisation, and just throw bandwidth at the problem until it goes away".

By all means work on ways of making individual things more efficient, for example to reduce costs of distribution. But if there's a way to create large amounts of (potentially cheap, in the long term) power, and "throw energy at the problem", then I'm all for it.

In fact.... we could potentially "solve" climate change this way too. Remember your school-level physics? Heat pumps? How air conditioning and fridges work? Right. So lets build a vast network of nuclear power stations & pump heat out of the atmosphere - maybe into the Earth's mantle, which has a thermal capacity probably 10^10 or 10^20 (someone else do the maths....) greater, and wouldn't notice the odd 0.00000001 degree C

Technological "big fixes" is what we need, not wishy-washy social engineering and poorly-disguised anti-capitalist political rhetoric (step forward FoE and Greenpeace) about "sustainability".