On Thursday the UK Government gave the the initial green light for the design of four new nuclear reactors.

Individual designs for the reactors have been put forward by Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., Areva, GE Energy, a unit of General Electric Co., and Westinghouse Electric Co., a unit of Japan’s Toshiba Corp.

A spokesperson for the the government said:
“This means the designs have gone through the first phase of the process - the preliminary safety case for each reactor design has been assessed”

The UK government had given their support for more nuclear power in order to meet targets for climate change. However, environmental group Greenpeace, won a legal case in February claiming the government’s initial public consultation was “legally flawed”.

Regardless of the result of that case, we are confident that the UK government will move to build more nuclear power plants, particularly as the new Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, is in favour of nuclear power.

The trouble is that many environmental or pressure groups kick up a storm against something, but offer no alternative to solve the problem, like protesting about nuclear power but offering no alternative to where the power will come from. Sometimes, they can be almost hypocritical. For example they will campaign vigorously against more nuclear power plants and then campaign equally hard to withdraw troops from Iraq. You cannot have it both ways. Either we shift to having the majority of our power from nuclear technology or we get sucked into wars in the middle east and other politically unstable areas of the world which have oil reserves underneath the sand. France did not need to go to Iraq and indeed will not need to go anywhere to protect their energy supply, and they are 80% nuclear and their supply of uranium comes from politically stable countries.

No doubt Greenpeace will play the “renewable energy card” but that is not a viable solution to the problem. It takes one windmill every 1000m along the French coast to replace one of their nuclear power plants. And what happens when the wind stops? The lights go out. It is worth pointing out the Sir Patrick Moore, founder and former leader of Greenpeace has come out in favour of nuclear power. The only viable renewable energy source we see at the moment is hydro power and possibly marine renewables such as wave and tidal power, which we have covered in a previous article entitled: The Uranium Banana Skin.

In conclusion this is the first of many steps that need to be taken by the UK government and governments around the world to ramp up the nuclear power production. As they do this, they will need more and more uranium, which pushes up the uranium price and the value of uranium stocks.