Nuclear fuel running out
The Energy Minister describes nuclear power as "home grown" and "indigenous" whereas we have no uranium mines. The "legacy" inventory in Sellafield and in storage ponds around the country is useless without a massive investment in re-enrichment centrifuges and then the lot could only fuel 3 reactors for their life-cycles (according to NDA).
Breeders would have to start up right now and need an initial charge of plutonium, a processing plant to separate the bred Pu from the U-238 blanket and the transuranics, plus a specialised Pu fuel plant.
With a down-payment to cover decommissioning and, if the Finnish experience is repeated, an unspecified build overrrun, the generators will be hard put to finance a new round, especially if the carbon credits they need for viability fail to be guaranteed by the government.
If fusion is dependent on the deuterium-tritium model, then there will never be enough tritium as it decays and comes from irradiating lithium in a reactor as was underway when Pile 1 caught fire.
Then uranium mining appears to have passed its Hubbert peak in 2005 and is in decline. Half the US nukes depend on Russian diluted ex-weapons HEU in a deal which ends in 2013 and will then be needed for Russia with a primary supply deficit. Whatever John Hutton announces on Thursday is immaterial - nuclear power is not going to continue in the UK.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
