Not sure how well this argument would apply to other technologies. The petrol engine, for example, was fifty years old in 1926 – it’s fair to say that there have been impressive gains in reliability, safety, efficiency etc since then.

Or, to take a few technologies that are roughly the same age as nuclear power: would you really be willing to rule out any order-of-magnitude improvements in electronics, radar, jet-engined aircraft design, rocketry, or radio astronomy? Has computing really hit a plateau from which further improvement is impossible?

I’d agree that nuclear power hasn’t developed as far or as fast as these! But it does show that being 50 years old doesn’t necessarily mean that a technology has reached its limits…

For that sort of money, you can have 500,000 council houses, assuming councils can wangle the land more or less for free (not difficult when you are in charge of granting planning permission). Which is the sort of number that we were building in the 1950s and 1960s.

I’d settle for steady improvements on safety and cost

But it’s been literally fifty years – what major gains, realistically, are we likely to see? The current nuclear industry is about as good as it’s going to get.

My own view is that I would only be open to arguments about new nuke power stations once it had been demonstrated that everybody who had ever worked in a senior capacity in the British nuclear power industry before, say, 2005 had been sacked. I just don’t trust them.

@ Luis – you’re right, they don’t.

I don’t want to get locked out either. I don’t know enough about the specifics of nuclear technology to say this with too much confidence, but I’m baffled by your statement that nuclear is a 1950s technology with no learning curve. You can look at the wikipedia page “nuclear power technology” as easily as I can, but seems to me like advances are being made. I don’t know about order of magnitude improvements; I’d settle for steady improvements on safety and cost. Plus, on the build and commercialization side of life, learning-by-doing is not about technological leaps forward, it’s about organisational cumulative experience.

If nuclear power can be made affordable and safe, surely that’s an outcome everybody wants – especially greens who want to see carbon emissions fall asap. I have no strong opinions either way, which is why parallel development of nuclear and renewables seems like a good idea to me.

What worries me about this debate, is rather than being open minded Popperian truth seekers, with everyone looking for the strengths and weaknesses in every argument in order to update their own positions, it’s full of people looking for weaknesses in their opponents arguments and ignoring the weaknesses in their own. I don’t mean you, here, D2. I’m thinking more of organizations like Greenpeace, who don’t strike me as people who are looking for arguments in favour of nuclear power because they seek the truth. In this context, deciding first and fitting your arguments second, is a very bad way to proceed.

Of course, they might already know the truth, and I don’t.

What learning curve? Nuclear power stations are 1950s technology. They aren’t going to make any order of magnitude improvements. The learning curve arguments are all in favour of renewables, not locking ourselves into an obsolete technology path.

and the locals are generally quite keen on nuclear power

Absolutely definitely not true of Wylfa; I don’t have first hand knowledge of the other sites but suspect the same.