GWPF have an interesting article about a promising new nuclear power technology - thorium reactors. Perhaps most intriguing is Sir John Beddington's opposition to their development:
...although the Coalition Government continues to pour subsidies worth many millions of pounds into wind power, which, as Live revealed earlier this year, produces at best intermittent energy with potential environmental costs, it has so far decided to do nothing about thorium except to maintain a ‘watching brief’.
The reason is that a review last year by the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir John Beddington, concluded that thorium research shouldn’t be a priority, as ‘development of the appropriate technology would appear to be some way into the future’.
That could be described as a depressingly circular argument: if the scientists aren’t funded to pursue the research and development, the technology will indeed remain in the future. Meanwhile, the reasons for Sir John’s pessimistic assessment seem baffling.
In a letter to Cywinski, he admitted the science behind thorium reactors was ‘well based’, and said the main reason he couldn’t recommend government support was because there had never been research on how to reprocess thorium fuel ‘on an industrial scale’.
But this, says Cywinski, totally missed the point: not only would thorium plants produce far less waste, but their fuel – which would only need to be refreshed every ten years, as opposed to 18 months in a conventional nuclear reactor – wouldn’t need to be reprocessed at all.
You do rather get the impression that Sir John has picked the government's winner for them - wind "power".