The parts of a boat have funny names to a landsman. Many of the names go back hundreds of years and their origins are often lost. Some make sense only if you know something of sailing ship construction in the 16th century.
Cheap dreams, expensive realities. In the dawn of the nuclear era, cost was expected to be one of the technology's advantages, not one of its drawbacks. The first chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss, predicted in a 1954 speech that nuclear power would someday make electricity âtoo cheap to meter.â.
Energy companies running the new nuclear power plants will have to pay the costs for decommissioning existing sites, and pay their share of waste management costs, the government has said. The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority has said the cost will be 72bn over 20 years-up from an estimate two years ago of 56bn.Critics, such as Greenpeace, say that the bill for building new waste dumps will be a further 21bn and then 30bn to build the new nuclear power stations.nce built, nuclear power plants have advantages. In a gas-fired plant, the gas alone makes up 80% of the cost of electricity. So firms and consumers are very exposed to the wholesale price of gas. But at a nuclear power plant, the fuel is processed uranium, accounting for just 10% of the cost of production.