Let's face the reality - you simply can not afford to lose those nukes. And this will become brutally obvious this winter or next.

My prediction - all AGRs and PWRs will get extensions. The 2 Magnox reactors of course will go but these are quite small units and it will not affect the overall balance significantly.

Tony Benn was reminiscing on a politics programme on BBC 4 yesterday and explained how the civil servants when he was energy minister wanted US made PWR. But Tony wouldn't have any of it.

Very proud of how he stood in the way and pursued more loony (and unproven) schemes.

ON a general point, fascinating overview ut nobody wants to pick up the ball and run and put down an over arching strategy ... sleepwalking seems to be the style of academia.

Needs a Barnes Wallis to put a banger up someone's bum... The guy who was banging on about energy security was 100% correct.

Final note ... OK so we build (hurriedly) say 10 Nuclear power plants ... where are the engineers ?

Interesting on the recent comment re Sputnik how that was a banger up the bum of US academe to to produce engineers by the bus load.

Perhaps if Putin (AKA Gazprom) who own the Belgin compressor stations (well a large % of) cut off our gas.

Thye would be doing us a favour.