Liberal Democrats surge in polls and send alarm bells ringing for the Conservatives

[MattFr]

It's not only the waste itself that is the problem because if a Nuclear plant goes wrong, it goes very wrong and as I have said 34,000 Nuclear weapons could be created from the plutonium from one year of Nuclear power production alone.

Nuclear has only gone properly wrong when Soviets have done it. I can't remember where I read it, but some study said that proper, modern and developed nuclear power stations are safer than traditional power stations. I'm not sure if you actually have any clue about nuclear waste disposal, but when nuclear waste is turned into glass via vitrification for storage (one method), it becomes stabilize and doesn't react. How do you make weapons from an un-reactable substance?

[alexxxxx]

in my opinion there's nothing wrong with nuclear power, nor even with its disposal, i just think it needs to be incredibly safe whilst in process and the disposal centres MUST be well maintained, plus the cost of building them and decommissioning them is incredibly high.

[MrPinkPanther]

Nuclear has only gone properly wrong when Soviets have done it. I can't remember where I read it, but some study said that proper, modern and developed nuclear power stations are safer than traditional power stations.

Possibly, I'll have to take a look. However as I have said if it goes wrong it goes terribly wrong. Chernobyl cost the Soviet Union over treble what it gained from Nuclear production at every other plant in the USSR and caused Cancer in thousands of people.

I'm not sure if you actually have any clue about nuclear waste disposal, but when nuclear waste is turned into glass via vitrification for storage (one method), it becomes stabilize and doesn't react. How do you make weapons from an un-reactable substance?

The technology that we use to create Nuclear energy we share with other countries right? Well the process that turns raw uranium into low grade uranium can also be applied to create high grade uranium which is perfect for Nuclear weapons. Further more I read somewhere that just 8KG of plutonium is enough for a Nagasaki size bomb.

[MattFr]

Possibly, I'll have to take a look. However as I have said if it goes wrong it goes terribly wrong. Chernobyl cost the Soviet Union over treble what it gained from Nuclear production at every other plant in the USSR and caused Cancer in thousands of people.

In my opinion, Chernobyl cannot be used as an argument against nuclear power. It's reactor has a positive void coefficient meaning the reactivity, by design, increased as the reactor coolant got hotter (which is obviously going to happen in a reactor). That, along with gross misconduct by the staff, is what caused the accident. All reactors in the west have a negative void coefficient which means the reactivity reduces as voids (typically bubbles) are created in the cooling from heating. This makes them passively safe. Positive void coefficient reactors are illegal in most of the west, and there are extremely tight guidelines on the running of plants meaning Chernobyl isn't going to happen again.

Here's some night time reading for you Ozzie babes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_coefficient
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power

[-:Undertaker:-]

I agree they are inefficient however they are "economical" in the sense that they generate more power than they cost. You need to remember that Wind power is just one small area that the Liberal Democrats want in their grand energy plan. For more information visit:
http://www.libdems.org.uk/energy_and...te_change.aspx

They are not economical because the costs of maintaining them do not make a saving, think of how much it costs to maintain them (you need somebody to go up and check which costs more in the sea because you need ships, safety engineers and so forth). Therefore they do not make a profit and create a loss, hence why our energy bills are soaring because of these pointless and useless schemes.

It's safe as long as they are not located near population, you are correct however where do we put it? I mean dumping it in the sea isn't going to work because it is going to harm its surroundings and you always run the risk of it being rediscovered far into the future. It's not only the waste itself that is the problem because if a Nuclear plant goes wrong, it goes very wrong and as I have said 34,000 Nuclear weapons could be created from the plutonium from one year of Nuclear power production alone.

The waste is buried or simply put into storage, again I shall refer back to background radiation in Cornwall which poses more of a threat than spent radioactive rods. The nuclear issue, i've looked deeply into this in the past and was obsessed with Chernobyl at one point however it must be noted above your scaremongering that Chernobyls powerplant was a Soviet (thus poor) creation and is not comparable to western nuclear power stations.

Energy bills will be higher at first, of course they will be. The green energy structure will prove costly but once it is up and running it is cheap to maintain and more importantly sustainable. It can help to make Britain completely independent so we no longer have to rely on the Middle east for energy.

You cannot supply your energy via windfarms, they require subsidies to run and are not economical and never will be. The amount of land/space needed to put these on, coupled with their short lifespan means they cannot be the future and quite frankly you are kidding yourself otherwise if you think they are the way forward. To add ontop of this yet again, they need turning off when the wind is too fast or too slow which again costs money and means they are totally and utterly unrealiable.

Incorrect. Thats what the government are saying however an independent study puts the cost of Trident as high as £130 Billion with the middle estimate being £100 Billion. It is because the governments estimates don't take into account the expansive forces required to support Trident nor the additional instillations that would be required. I mean the two aircraft carriers for Trident alone are likely to cost £5 Billion.

Them costs will be already accounted for within the military budget then, running costs to be frank. I have no idea what you are talking about here, are you making it up(?) - Trident does not include aircraft carriers as it is all submarine based so maybe that is why the figures Nick Clegg is giving are wrong because hes coupling things together to make the costs seem worse than they are. Besides, I have no problems with paying £20 trillion, £100 trillion or £300 trillion for Trident - that is what we pay our taxes for, upmostly being the defence of the nation.

A lot of Liberal Democrats are against the Euro and as I have said it isn't current policy. Many of the leading Liberal Democrats have recently said in Public that they don't think the Euro is a good idea.

Wow, is that a reason to believe you now despite the fact you backtracked on your promise to try and force a referendum for the Lisbon Treaty yet your leader Nick Clegg made sure it made its way through the Commons unopposed. The Labour Party, Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats can not be trusted on Europe and anybody who believes otherwise is foolish at best.

The Liberal Democrats propose STV, one of the most proportional electoral systems there is!

It is not proportional representation still, not in the best form possible which will still keep the 3-party monopoly.

We've been through this. The Winter of discontent was caused by excessive trade union movement and strikes, nothing to do with a "brain drain". Essentially the Unions demanded pay rises above the governments set 5% target which was designed to curb inflation, the government refused and people walked out from work en masse. If you wish me to go into more detail on this point then just ask, I'm quite interested in the Winter of Discontent ^-^.

We are not talking about the Winter of Discontent, we are talking about the gradual decline which occured under the last hard left-wing government which had similar ideals to the Liberal Democrats. If you tax the rich (aka the successful) then you create a braindrain, some of our most talented and best fled this country during the 1970s because of the higher taxes which means that in the end, you end up with less tax. Lower taxation = more revenue for government and people as proven by the Thatcherite-Reaganomics policy in the 80s in both the UK and US.

Possibly, I'll have to take a look. However as I have said if it goes wrong it goes terribly wrong. Chernobyl cost the Soviet Union over treble what it gained from Nuclear production at every other plant in the USSR and caused Cancer in thousands of people.

That was a Soviet powerplant, not a western powerplant which are very safe. I believe the only issue with a western powerplant was the 3-mile island issue which occured in America, nuclear has advanced amazingly and is the only realistic option left in terms of energy security and viability.

The technology that we use to create Nuclear energy we share with other countries right? Well the process that turns raw uranium into low grade uranium can also be applied to create high grade uranium which is perfect for Nuclear weapons. Further more I read somewhere that just 8KG of plutonium is enough for a Nagasaki size bomb.

And..?

If anything, the United Kingdom should be building secure units in which countries like Japan, Germany and others would be paying us to store their waste for them which i'm sure would generate a lot of money for this country. However we cannot do this, thanks to the hyterical, militant green lobby.

[xxMATTGxx]

Could anyone tell me what other plans they wish to do with the "military", I know they want to scrap the trident but is that it?

[Jordy]

Could anyone tell me what other plans they wish to do with the "military", I know they want to scrap the trident but is that it?

Well Nick Clegg's against the Anglo-American relationship and also fails to mention NATO in any Lib Dem documents on defence, so there's clearly an issue there.

They appear incredibly vague when it comes to the military (And every other one of their policies) so it's very risky voting for them. They claim they'll review the armed forces so they're more suitable for today and will not renew trident. That's about it really;
http://www.libdems.org.uk/our_manifesto_your_world.aspx

It really is beginning to worry me how vague the Liberal Democrats are, they could be even worse than they already seem

[xxMATTGxx]

Well Nick Clegg's against the Anglo-American relationship and also fails to mention NATO in any Lib Dem documents on defence, so there's clearly an issue there.

They appear incredibly vague when it comes to the military (And every other one of their policies) so it's very risky voting for them. They claim they'll review the armed forces so they're more suitable for today and will not renew trident. That's about it really;
http://www.libdems.org.uk/our_manifesto_your_world.aspx

It really is beginning to worry me how vague the Liberal Democrats are, they could be even worse than they already seem

Hate them already.

Trident = Need
Nato = Good

They need to release proper information ;/

[alexxxxx]

I think LibDems will have a real test in the next debate. With little to zero experience with foreign policy and not much being said about defence, apart from not supporting a full-scale trident replacement, they could run into problems. It'll be interesting to see.

[Wig44.]

It's unbelievable how many people are voting for the lib dems and don't know the first thing about their policies. It seems people just want any alternative to labour/conservatives and so blindly vote the lib dems in. I've seen evidence of this on television and from people where I live. How many of the people of this forum have parents in the public sector? They will all have pension cuts and pay freezes. Then there is the problem of 'green' energy, which is costly and inefficient and their scheme to bribe people into using green energy. This will cost a hell of a lot of money, and they have not justified where this money is coming from in their manifesto. There are some other changes (e.g income tax) which they have justified (the money comes from here) but it doesn't add up. So as I see it they are promising things that are way too expensive. Then there is the ridiculous policy 'reducing the number of people with short sentences' to save money - indicating therefore that this isn't more long term sentences but less sentences in total. What? You're going to let more people off to save money or have I misunderstood? The latter I hope.

Lib dems are so pro-EU it is unbelievable. They would have us support the unfair EU 'police'. Europol has the right to arrest you with no evidence and detain you for 6 months, no questions asked. What worries me is the chance that the lib dems may take this further and switch to corpus juris. The EU's system of corpus juris is unfair where you are not innocent until proven guilty and can be arrested before any investigation has taken place and detained for months, unlike in Britain where we have common law & Habeas Corpus. Furthermore, whereas a jury is sovereign in our courts, this is very much not so in EU courts. A career judiciary who are the judges and prosecutors replaces the jury and the defence (a group of lawyers) are treated as inferior. Double jeopardy (charged of the same crime twice after the first trial failed to convict) is sadly commonplace in the EU system - not in Britain though. What disgusts me is the Lib Dems assertion that the Lisbon Treaty was good for Britain. Let me be straight with you Nick, you're either deluded or a liar.

I like the fact the Lib Dems will pay more to the front line soldiers, I don't like how they will 'hold a defence review' to sort out what will happen without trident. I assume they mean after being elected in - why can't they formulate something now - got something to hide?

They also don't seem to realise that asylum sekers should go to the nearest safe country for asylum. They sometimes travel through 45 safe countries to reach Britain because of the welfare state and not tough on immigration mentality of the government. We've taken on so many asylum seekers, it's time the 45 countries who the asylum seekers could choose take them in instead, and time we stopped accepting asylum seekers. We have no room and have done more than our fair share. When turkey joins the EU and 75,000,000+ people are free to emmigrate to the UK the lib dems and their ridiculous immigration policy will turn less population dense parts of the country into the splitting at the seems overcrowded scenario that many areas around the country face. Any jobs that we 'need' immigrant workers for should be filled by jobseekers. we have so many people who are unemployed we should not be importing workers to do jobs.

Before I go on I'd like to see what you have to say on these points.

Edit: I noticed you said that some lib dems oppose joning the euro-zone. Nick Clegg has almost explicitly said that in future we will join the euro (if he had his way) and this worries me because the euro is not a stable currency in my eyes and not only this but it would be very hard to leave once joined. This is because all gold and old currency (£) is sent to the ECB. This can only be a ploy by the EU to stop people backing out because that is all it does - stops people from backing out.