All About the Figures

According to the World Bank, the reconstruction of Iraq will cost $53bn (or so it says in this article), that's to rebuild an entire country.

The latest estimates from the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) put the clean-up of existing nuclear sites in the UK at £70bn (that's about $121bn).

Someone explain to me:

a) how nuclear power is anywhere near viable without extensive government funding

b) why we're even thinking about building more plants when it costs more than twice as much to clean-up after them than it takes to rebuild a country

And that's before we consider the fact that no-one actually has any idea what to do with the waste long term (and by long term, we're talking thousands of years for the really good stuff), except melt it into glass, bury deep underground and cover it with concrete.

Pump £70bn into renewable research and watch what happens, or let's all try micropower.