I cautiously welcome this development. Needless to say, I'm against the government signing us up to a fixed price deal - that is sheer economic incompetence, who knows what the energy prices might be if/when we have a new generation of nuclear power stations providing us with plentiful electricity? However, something needed to be done following the balls up that was Labour's "head-in-the-sand" approach to keeping the lights on, and this appears to indeed be something.
Some points to note...
Fukishima was clobbered by a tsunami causing damage exceeding design limitations - to date, no one has died or been made ill. The likelihood of a tsunami hitting Britain is remote. Fukishima is not a good case study to choose if you want to shut down the nuclear industry.
Fukishima, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island all have one failure in common. In each case it was a failure of a water cooled system which led to disaster. The early British reactors use the much safer (in theory) gas cooled systems. These don't tend to operate at as high a pressure as water/steam and can, therefore, be considered to be safer by design.
Radioactive waste and its storage is a major problem with the current types of nuclear reactors that we use. Without delving too deep into the physics, Uranium, which has long been the fissile material of choice, produces waste which requires additional and expensive processing and storage. However, in India, there is a new generation of Thorium reactor starting to come on line. As Thorium decays, it produces different waste to Uranium. Crucially, Thorium's waste can be reused to produce further fissile material and is therefore, more efficient and produces considerably less waste. Furthermore, the radioactive half life of Thorium waste is in the hundreds of years, rather than the tens of thousands of years range of Uranium.
Unfortunately for Britain, if we ordered one of these new Thorium reactors tomorrow it would be about twenty years before it is producing a single watt of energy. This is because the nuclear industry is so over regulated today. We are in the ironic position of having had the anti-nuclear lobby insist on so much red tape on any new design of reactor (incidentally, that is the main reason why each MW of electricity is having to be subsidised at such a high rate) that we are now stuck with using obsolete and more hazardous technology.
Finally it's a crying shame that our government has, over the last fifty years or so, squandered our preeminence in domestic nuclear energy production through blinkered ignorance and tit-for-tat politics. Nuclear power, like most forms of engineering it seems to me, has become a dirty word. Speaking as an engineer, I treat our politicians ignorance with contempt.