Not an option. The UK faces an energy crisis and even if these new nuclear power plants, based on existing designs and technology, are rushed through at maximum speed, with no planning delays and so on, they still won't arrive in time to plug the gap, so old coal or nuclear plants are going to stay online past their sell-by dates. We should have been arguing in this thread five years ago, but the govt we had then didn't fancy making an unpopular energy policy, so they kicked the can down the road. If you want to wait until thorium works, reactors have been designed, and then built, you will have turn your fridge off for a couple of decades.
There isn't an economically viable energy source to be had at present. All major power generation hardware requires billions of pounds of investment and is only economically viable based on assumptions about their fuel that may amount to nothing.
Coal fired stations built today come with nebulous promises about clean coal - nobody knows if that is ever going to be feasible, but if it isn't then there is a strong likelihood of increasingly high taxes on carbon emissions leading to greatly reduced lifespan and therefore returns. If anyone does work out how to extract and store carbon from power stations, that [LIFTED]'s likely to be expensive.
Gas fired stations are reliant on a fuel that, while abundant, is directly linked to oil prices. That will probably change, but no guarantee is available. The potential for supply disruption is huge given the locations of known gas fields, and the possibility that shale reserves may not be tapped for environmental reasons. On top of that we have a lot of gas fired generation capability already, so it's hardly desirable to make ourselves more dependent upon it.
Oil is clearly an even riskier bet.
Solar power sucks and will continue to do so for an unspecified period of time.
Wind power is widely deployed only because it is the least awful of the available renewables right now, any country that bases its energy policy on such an unreliable source is in the hands of idiots.
Hydro electric power is fine as long as you have untapped viable sources, we have few if any.
Tidal power is at least predictable, giving it a big advantage over wind, but on any large scale it disrupts even larger ecosystems. Large resources are rare and controversial.
Wave power requires machines with moving parts to be immersed in highly corrosive fluid for long periods without seizing up or getting covered in limpets, viability has not so far been demonstrated.
Nuclear power is within the same kind of cost range as most of those options.
Over the life of a power station - half a century or so - things that make gas and oil cheap today seem likely to lose their effect. The volume of fuel required for these operations is huge, and that means that supply has to be managed on a just in time basis - you really can't stock pile 10 years worth of oil and gas - so no matter what price oil reaches today, you have to buy some. The only way to hedge against fluctuating prices is to take out some form of insurance contract via commodities brokerages. Demand is growing faster than supply, and that seems unlikely to change.
Against that, nuclear requires high capital investment, massive decommissioning costs, and the long term storage for radioactive materials could cost enormous amounts. Refining the fuel is also very expensive. But the cost of the actual fuel is relatively low, and the volumes required are low enough that you can easily stockpile it. Some of those costs can be reduced or shifted around with current technology; waste can be reduced with better fuel reprocessing and so on, although this would itself require investment in new plant. It isn't unreasonable to predict that decommissioning and storage costs can be reduced with new technology - I don't want to overplay that for the same reasons that I don't rate the chances of clean coal very highly.
The upshot is though, that all the alternatives to oil and gas become relatively cheaper as prices of those commodities rise. Nuclear power of the currently available varieties becomes viable if a barrel of oil reaches a certain level. Estimates vary and it's easy to pick the one that suits your argument. I've seen claims ranging from < $100/b to over $300 depending on the assumptions that factor in and the technology required. Oil is at the low end of that range already, where are you betting it will be in 30 years time?
