From the New York Times - 29th May 2009, discussing the current Okiluoto plant construction:

The massive power plant under construction on muddy terrain on this Finnish island was supposed to be the showpiece of a nuclear renaissance. The most powerful reactor ever built, its modular design was supposed to make it faster and cheaper to build. And it was supposed to be safer, too.

But things have not gone as planned.

After four years of construction and thousands of defects and deficiencies, the reactor’s 3 billion euro price tag, about $4.2 billion, has climbed at least 50 percent. And while the reactor was originally meant to be completed this summer, Areva, the French company building it, and the utility that ordered it, are no longer willing to make certain predictions on when it will go online.

and further ...

Serious problems first arose over the vast concrete base slab for the foundation of the reactor building, which the country’s Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority found too porous and prone to corrosion. Since then, the authority has blamed Areva for allowing inexperienced subcontractors to drill holes in the wrong places on a vast steel container that seals the reactor.

In December, the authority warned Anne Lauvergeon, the chief executive of Areva, that “the attitude or lack of professional knowledge of some persons” at Areva was holding up work on safety systems.

Today, the site still teems with 4,000 workmen on round-the-clock shifts ... Some 10,000 people speaking at least eight different languages have worked at the site. About 30 percent of the workforce is Polish, and communication has posed significant challenges.

Areva has acknowledged that the cost of a new reactor today would be as much as 6 billion euros, or $8 billion, double the price offered to the Finns. But Areva said it was not cutting any corners in Finland. The two sides have agreed to arbitration, where they are both claiming more than 1 billion euros in compensation. (Areva blames the Finnish authorities for impeding construction and increasing costs for work it agreed to complete at a fixed price.).

Even if the proposed plants here in the UK were built in time they would be too late to make a difference to our emissions targets, they replace dependency on foreign oil with dependency on foreign uranium and we still have no idea what to do with the waste apart from pass it on to this generation's children to deal with. How we will deal with the last of those in a world of increasingly expensive electricity from reducing quantities of gas (or 'clean' coal??) in a creaking National Grid, to guarantee to keep those spent fuel cooling ponds cool is something I dread to think about. So hows about not creating any more of the stuff? And have a read of the chapter "Hot Legacy" in Alan Weisman's book "The World without Us" - our poisoned legacy of military and public nuclear waste will make your toes curl.

The Green Party wrote of nuclear power in a leaflet over 20 years ago: "A power generation method that is so expensive, so incomprehensibly technical, so centrally organised, so elusive of democratic control, so elitist, so male-dominated, so thoughtlessly, massively exploitative of resources - such a system mirrors precisely those areas in our society most in need of ecological change". No change there then.

For me, any political party that advocates nuclear as a solution to our society's energy situation is ruled out as a serious contender as it show that they are focussed on symptoms and not causes which seems to be an endemic malaise of current politics. And even more so when there is hardly the slightest attempt to reduce our consumption which of course is the simplest, cheapest and best long-term thing we can do.