Re: Lack of comprehension and imagination ...
it matters that the specific funding proposal would only allow you to build them at the pace I mentioned. In that context, it doesn't matter whose responsibility the costs of storage and disposal of waste would be, it only matters that the costs exist and weren't accounted for, therefore the total cost of the nuclear power generation would exceed the budget that would be made available by diverting renewable subsidies.
If you are following the discussion carefully then you'll note that even the Guardian says that the costs are built into the price of the minimum guaranteed electricity price, which is currently under half the current market level.
Given the ~£9 billion a year spent on wind subsidies is ok, and it costs ~20 billion for a nuclear plant then you could either build a new plant every two years paid for in full from the existing subsidies (and get the power ten years later) or build a batch of 5 nuclear plants and spread the cost over those ten years. Upon completion in ~2031 that's 16GW worth of fossil fuel generation that would drop off the power generation net forever; which given that at the moment we are drawing 16.57GW from gas turbines means that this would leave the largest CO2 emissions from power generation as being the 3GW worth of "biomass" generation, which in plain English is trees chopped down in South America, shipped to the US to be made into wood pellets and then shipped to the UK to be burned. This is of course counted as green renewable energy at the moment.
If it turns out that it's not possible to solve the problem with wind, hydro, geothermal, solar, and battery storage, sure, nuclear's the next least worst thing to add to the mix (unless I'm forgetting something). But you should probably at least work through all of those first.
Wind is a strategy of committing to gas turbines forever with wind just used as greenwashing. Look at the chart on Gridwatch; it shows the level of productivity of wind turbines. Imagine that you quadruple the number of wind turbines, requiring payments to the very rich owners every year at a level above the defence or education budgets to keep the lights on. You still have entire months where the power is coming from gas because the generation line will simply be 4x above where it is now for wind, and four times nothing is still nothing.
With battery storage, this is an IT site so i'll assume that you are familiar with a bog standard UPS. If not, google it. A typical UPS provides around a kilowatt hour worth of electricity. Multiply that by a thousand. That's a megawatt hour worth of storage; so you need to multiply that by a thousand again. That's now one gigawatt hour; which gives a rough idea of the amount of space and expense required to store one hours worth of electricity.
1*1000*1000=1,000,000. So your looking at approximately the space and expense of one million UPS's. For one gigawatt hour worth of power. To smooth out small daily variations of about 5GW for 24 hours would therefore require 5*24=120GW worth of battery storage. How much space would 120 million UPS's take up? The mind boggles. And that's the low end of the useful requirement, as if you were running purely on wind power given it effectively vanishes for a month at a time you'd want a months worth of power stored; 40GW*24*30=28800 Gigawatt hours, which would be a requirement of 28,800,000,000 UPSish size and cost equivalents.
A kilowatt hour UPS cost is about four hundred quid. Let's arbitrarily reduce the real world cost by a factor of eight to £50 each allowing for what out in the real world is an absurd and unachievable efficiencies of scale and cost. But just for the sake or argument; multiply by the requirement of 28,800,000,000. The rough cost of a months power stored would be £1,440,000,000,000. That's one trillion, four hundred and forty billion quid. And it'll last about about one thousand charge cycles before the amount of energy stored drops by >70%. That's typically about 6 years in service which is why things like laptops and smartphones are always replaced on a five year cycle.
That amount would pay for 72 nuclear reactors of the Hinkley point type assuming no efficiencies of scale in cost, generating >230 GW of power which is enough electricity to totally decarbonise transport and heating for the entire of western Europe and would last the next century instead of for about 5 years.
Even 24 hours worth of storage at that scale would buy you 2.5 nuclear plants of the Hinkley point type. And frankly, I doubt that you could ever do it at that price; that's based on £50 per kilowatt hour. Musk says his solutions through life cost is $300 per kilowatt hour on his new Tesla Megapack.
So yeah, unviable.
For instance, your own earlier tossed-in idea about water wheels. I've no idea if that's at all practical, but again for the purpose of argument, let's say it's a genius idea that would entirely solve the problem: why don't we just do that now? It would still likely be a lot cheaper and faster than building a bunch of new nuclear power plants.
Because while individually the cost is low so is the generation capacity added. It's a stupid idea, just less stupid than wind turbines which are positively idiotic, and it at least has the virtue of adding capacity that works 24/7 unless the rivers freeze, run dry or burst their banks, which I think everybody can agree are reasonably uncommon occurrences relative to the wind conditions required for optimal function of wind turbines.
It also sensibly makes use of the engineering of the rivers done to facilitate waterpower that date back beyond recorded history. (the 1066 doomsday book lists 6000 waterwheels...)
If it turns out that it's not possible to solve the problem with wind, hydro, geothermal, solar, and battery storage, sure, nuclear's the next least worst thing to add to the mix (unless I'm forgetting something). But you should probably at least work through all of those first.
Wind we've done to death, and I trust that in light of the figures above you'll see how absurd battery storage is.
Hydro is lovely, but gives the term "expensive" a bad name and we don't have enough valleys etc to dam and flood, and besides the people living in them tend to complain somewhat about being forced out of their homes. The proposals for tidal power are feel good pipe dreams to distract from the reality that they are several orders of magnitude too expensive to deploy at a useful scale.
With regards to geothermal, we aren't exactly Iceland. In the UK you can get a reasonable list of cost effective locations by looking up where we have hot springs >30 degrees. That leaves 6 sites, 5 of which are in a world heritage site and grade utterly untouchable listed. That leaves one reasonable site which might possibly be able to generate "up to" 0.1GW if it roughly doubles what Iceland manages from similar sites.
Solar? IN THE UK?! Have you perhaps confused our near perpetually overcast weather conditions with Saudi Arabia? Do you even want to do the sums on it?
Suffice to say that it makes battery storage look sensible. It only make sense when your have a solar system installed and are getting paid several times what it costs for the utility company to produce the power; which means your bills go down for the power you "feed in" and then get basically "free" power later on in the evening and get a lower bill. This has the effect of increasing every other users electricity costs to pay for the chap with the solar panels and so only works when a handful of people have them. What happens when everybody has one?
(Answer; the feedback costs would exceed the generation costs of the electricity; and see the current crisis with energy companies collapsing when required to sell for under the electricity cost as to why solar feed in schemes have been closed to new entrants...)
Which brings us back to Nuclear as being the sole sensible option if you want bills under half today's level rather than at the current level or even double this.
Don't get me wrong; you can generate sort of enough power otherwise and you could even do it in a way that could be described as green if one was willing to indulge in sufficient denial of reality (cough, biomass, cough). It just requires not eliminating CO2 emissions and taxing the poor on their electricity bills to pay the rich subsidies (to generally not produce electricity) on a level equivalent to several multiples of the defence budget. And making transport and heating things for the top 40% of the population and beyond the grasp of the other 60% unless they impoverish themselves.
Which given that everybody gets a vote each creates conditions that outright require the creation of a British populist analogue of Trump, and hands this putative politician about a 60% vote share on a platter when he demands that the policies of "tax the poor to create the rich" cease and completely fairly points the finger of blame at the hippy types who have impoverished the majority of the population.
Should this come to pass then you'd assume that when the future populist gets voted in then he's going to want to deliver lower electricity prices within his term. Since nuclear build terms are 10 years or 2.5 political terms if you start immediately he won't do that; he'll probably build a quick and cheap option that can be up in 3 years from commencement and deliver lower electricity prices immediately thereafter; coal plants, and probably fracking for cheaper gas prices. The green types protesting against building them at that point will probably very literally get lynched.
Which brings us back to Nuclear. ;)