Shouldn't be to long until Uranium returns whether people like...

Shouldn't be to long until Uranium returns whether people like it or not.

"Carbon emissions cannot do anything other than rise as a result of phasing out the continent's largest source of zero-carbon power ? and doing this just a week after the International Energy Agency reported that 2010 carbon emissions rose to the highest levels ever is little short of criminal...

...There is perhaps a certain discomfort about the fact that one of the best options for tackling global warming just so happens to be a technology that greens had spent decades opposing before climate change even hit the agenda. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard green groups insisting that climate change is the "greatest challenge ever to face humanity". Yet their refusal to reassess their inherited positions against nuclear power suggest that none of them actually believe what they are saying ? or that most environmentalists are prepared to take refuge in ideologically motivated wishful thinking even when the future of the planet is at stake.

If the German greens really took climate change seriously, they would instead be pushing for a phase-out of coal ? which generates by far the largest proportion of the country's power and consequent carbon emissions ? from Germany's electricity grid...

...The German government insists that the nuclear phase-out plan is entirely compatible with its emission-reduction goals. Yet this is the same government which recently extended subsidies for loss-making coal mines until 2018. It also flies in the face of mathematical logic: in 2008 Germany relied on nuclear for 23 percent of its electricity. Renewable generation in Germany has increased substantially in recent years (to 17% in 2010) ? yet to ask renewables to replace nuclear as well as fossil fuels will make the achievement of Germany's climate goals doubly difficult, and therefore twice as unlikely to actually happen.

The silliness does not stop there. Much of Germany's renewables investment has been in solar photovoltaics in recent years, thanks to extraordinarily generous feed-in-tariffs. Yet these solar roofs are so expensive that they cost more than ?700 per tonne of carbon abated, compared to a carbon price in Europe of ?15 or less. One expert study suggests that the whole solar experiment up until this year has already landed German energy consumers with a ?120bn liability for the next two decades ? this in order to generate a mere 2% of the country's electricity, or less than a single large nuclear plant."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2011/jun/15/italy-nuclear-referendum