Just because it's safe doesn't mean it's the best we have right now.
It's massively expensive to set up
It's massively expensive to decommission at end of life
Almost half of the fuel you need to run them comes from a country dangerously close to Russia. (This one is slightly less of a thing now that Russia has bogged itself down in Ukraine)
It takes a long time to set up.
It has an image problem.
A combination of solar, wind, wave, tidal, more traditional hydro and geothermal (most of the cost with this is digging the holes. We've got a lot of deep old mines that can be repurposed) can easily be built to over capacity and or alongside adequate storage is the best solution in the here and now.
I think if the issues with russian gas have shown us anything it's that energy security should be treated as being much more important than it has in the past. So maybe it should come from tax payers money and be thought of as part of a broad national defence strategy.
I'd argue it's not even that we don't have a solution.
It's we need to implement the solution. There's absolutely tonnes to energy storage solutions ( batteries, storing it as heat, storing it as potential energy) that would work well on grid scale, just need to have their implementation catch up with generation capacity.
You will work in the NHS or the firefighters and so on, so you will certainly engage with community members of all ages and from all wakes of life. For a year of mandatory service that everybody is meant to complete, 18 is arguably the best time to do it.
But anyone who's not 18 will be denied that "opportunity".
When you walk on a public road past a hospital do you think to yourself "they stole my money to build this"? You have rights and duties as a citizen. Your service benefits the community as a whole.
Exactly, I already give over a portion of my labour time via taxes to help society. Forcing people to do 25 days extra unpaid work is either slavery or a huge one off tax on 18 year olds.
There's also no exceptions. So you've already got a job that requires you to do weekends? Touch shit. So you've got staff shortages. Already work for the fire service or police etc. Touch shit. You've got to go pick litter up for 25 days.
25 days of slavery is 25 days too much in my opinion.
Also if we're arguing that it's too bring communities together why is it only 18 year olds? Wouldn't mixing with a wide variety of ages from 18 to 118 be better? Also why is the stick to make people do it a fine (so that the rich will just pay if their kids don't want to do it)?
But besides that, the proposal is even worse than just conscription. His plan is that there'll be about 30,000 placements in the armed forces, which will of course be paid. Everyone else will have to do 25 days of unpaid "volunteering". Of the volunteering is mandatory and your parents will be fined if you don't do it.
Effectively it's slave labour for the poor and pay so you don't need to do it for the rich.
Luckily it's extremely likely he's not going to get to try to bring it in. They're about 20 points behind in the polls and on some they've actually been falling further behind since calling the election.
It's not grammar it's an entitlement different word. It would be like refusing to call a dog a dog because you think it sounds better to call it a cat.
Edit - you know what, I'm leaving that auto correct in. Entitlement looks better here to me than entirely.