If you travel on the London underground, you may be seeing a lot more of nuclear waste over the next few weeks than you've been used to. We've joined The Mayor of London Ken Livingstone in launching a poster campaign to tell Londoners about the alternative to the new nuclear power stations Tony Blair wants to build - and inviting them to join the debate on our energy future.
Everybody knows that we need to make some pretty drastic changes - and quickly - to the way we produce electricity, if we're going to avert catastrophic climate change. The government says the answer is a new generation of nuclear power stations.
We - along with Ken Livingstone - know that nuclear power can't stop climate change or bridge the energy gap. Not only that, but it produces large amounts of highly dangerous wastes that are incredibly costly to manage (the cost for clearing up the last generation of nuclear power stations alone has soared to £0 billion).
We also know that there is an alternative that's not only cheaper, cleaner and more secure than nuclear power, it will also do far more to combat climate change: an efficient, decentralised energy system that includes combined heat, power and cooling plants, biomass and renewables.
A decentralised energy system can more than double the efficiency of power stations and slash carbon emissions. So how does it work? Two thirds of all energy going into the UK's existing power stations is lost as waste heat. By generating electricity close to where it is used in combined heat and power plants (CHP), we can capture this waste heat and pipe it around to heat local buildings and districts.
Woking Borough Council has reduced its emissions by 77 pe cent through renewables and using its own local grid. Why shouldn't London do the same?
"Developing the infrastructure for decentralised energy would be financially and environmentally more cost effective than using nuclear power," says Ken Livingstone. "It would mean less carbon emissions and it would help reduce Londoners' fuel bills."
We've produced a documentary (above), narrated by Clive Anderson, to explain exactly how decentralised energy is already slashing emissions for Woking and for a number of countries around the world. There is a clean and safe solution to slashing our carbon emissions - surely worth 17 minutes of your time?
