Demanding tithes of nuclear material from commonwealth nations by royal decree is so wonderfully neo-feudal sci-fi, I love it.

Starmer Voice Where I come from, we're not great at building rail lines because we're too busy railing lines from the bosom of this beautiful nation

Technically yes, it still creates some waste to be dealt with. I guess arguably you have the same with decommissioned turbines, solar panels, etc with other forms.

This year's been a bit odd with all the rain, but we've been having great summers of late. We get plenty of sun the winter too despite the temperature.

It's a bit of a meme that the UK is always rainy. It isn't always rainy, it does rain a lot but it doesn't rain anywhere close to all the time and when it's not raining it can get quite hot, quite unbearably in fact because we don't have air conditioning.

Anyway heat isn't really relevant to solar panels, what they really need is just sunlight in general, and we get plenty of that even if it isn't particularly hot. In fact solar panels don't actually like being particularly hot so they probably won't work very well in the Sahara desert. Despite what everyone may think.

You can definitely achieve more if you can work the supply-side as well. In theory if the smart grid were well executed then it'd be possible for consumers to modulate their heat, charging, tumble dryers etc... to provide more elasticity.

Unfortunately in a lot of places the incentives aren't that high. I don't have that option where I live, but in denver the lowest consumer rate is around 7c and the highest around 17c/kWh. It's hard to invest in new appliances to exploit that difference, but if the off-peak number were 1c then I think you'd see much more take-up of smart car chargers and people delaying when they do laundry.

Unfortunately, renewables cannot do it alone

They absolutely can when paired with storage. Nuclear is not needed.

The conservatives just operate on the assumption that everybody else doesn't have a clue what's going on because they don't.

I bet they were told that the nuclear commission were going to open another power plant and just ignored them and gave out the oil drilling contracts anyway.

Only a fool would advocate for paying way more for nuclear when renewables + storage are substantially cheaper.

Actually coal energy is expensive. Renewable energy is cheap energy.

Nope, burning coal was cheap a long time ago and allowed the people to accululate enough wealth to push for more coal (and brain-wash people to believe coal is cheap; and also how expensive renewables are). Just like the nuclear producers did decades ago to tell the tale of how there's no alternative to nuclear.

The actual reality looks like this. And if you think that you need to pay more for electricity to not destroy the planet that's already their propaganda having done their work.

The real thing is the cost, the cost per kWh is falling so going nuke and locking in to a price that's already above market makes no sense at all.

The Tories are ideologically opposed to renewables because of some weird culture war thing, plus they hate the idea of locally sustainable communities not being totally under the control of billionaires - people are a lot easier to scare into obedience when you can tell them their power might be shut off. The main reason though is huge projects can only go to huge companies, they don't want lots of little solar farms they want their oil baron buddies to maintain their monopolies, that's the only reason we still hear so much about this now allbut obsolete technology.