Well, it’s not just a matter of energy independence. Yes, we’d reduce our dependence on imports of fossil fuels and uranium, and that’s important.

It’s not just about sustainability. Yes, we’d be using the only sustainable, renewable power supplies available to us, and that’s important too.

It’s not only that we’ve got a forthcoming gap between demand and generation capacity in 2015, a gap that renewables can fill, but nuclear cannot. It will be good to keep the lights on.

It’s only partly that we’ve got to start cutting our greenhouse gas emissions right now, and whereas nuclear plants have a high upfront GHG cost and only start recovering them 5-10 years in, wind turbines start paying back within a year.

It’s a bit to do with the fact that a disaster at a wind farm would result in a turbine blade flattening some crops, whereas a catastrophic core breach at a nuclear plant would spell the end of Britain as a country, permanently, with many dead, and almost everyone else irradiated and forced to emigrate.

Some people will consider it significant that there just aren’t many nuclear technicians in the world, and not many at all in Britain; which means that whereas a surge in renewables could create tens of thousands of British jobs, a nuclear renaissance will create jobs as cleaners for a few hundred British workers, and we’ll have to bring in thousands of overseas workers to keep our plants generating. Now, personally I think mixing local workers and guest workers is great, but in terms of supporting UK plc economically, then inward investment is a much better investment than hiking up our imports.

It’s something (but not everything) to do with the way that nuclear plants have been associated with nuclear weapons proliferation for fifty years, and will continue to be so, and the world faces two major threats: catastrophic climate change and nuclear war. There is no sane trade off between them, we must avert both.

But in the end, it comes down to something fairly simple.

For fifty years, the nuclear industry has promised us safe, clean electricity too cheap to meter. But what it’s delivered us is lies, cover-ups, leaks, accidents, breaches, cracked cores, leukemia clusters, forged safety certificates, a lot of waste that we have no safe way of disposing of, an ever-growing bill for tens of billions of pounds for the clean-up, and unmanageable risks in running and decommissioning the plants that the private sector has refused to take on. Nuclear has failed.

Renewables have succeeded in delivering us clean, safe, affordable, sustainable energy. And there’s more than enough renewables to keep Britain and the world powered for millions of years.

For an idea of how much power is available for offshore wind, take a look at the proposal for a North Sea Ring: http://cleantechnica.com/2009/01/15/oma-planning-north-sea-energy-super-ring-of-wind-farms/ which could provide 13,400 TWh per year: 30 times our current electricity consumption. So that’s plenty to go round, even in sharing it with 6 other countries.

See also the work by Gregor Czisch on how there’s sufficient pumped hydro in Europe to balance wind’s intermittency.

And, of course, see http://www.stormsmith.nl/ on some of the limits of the world dashing for nukes.

Why not try re-running MacKay’s calculations using some more realistic numbers? Monocrystalline panels can now yield 25%. The Salter duck captured around 90% of wave energy, rather than Pelamis’s 5-10%.

And so on…

In short, renewables WILL deliver for Britain, and nuclear cannot: we can get 0GW of new nuclear online in the next 10 years. Or we can get tens of gigawatts of new renewables. Why would anyone support the latter route?