THE COST & 'COST' OF NUCLEAR POWER

Letter to The Scotsman - April 1990

The conflicting letters (from Steuart Campbell and Kerr MacGeregor) on the costs of nuclear-generated electricity are basically irrelevant to the main issue. The costing of nuclear power is umimportant. If nuclear power generation is acceptably safe then it does not really matter how dear it is - we need energy and must pay its price and use it economically. If nuclear power generation is unaccceptably dangerous then we should phase it out - however cheap it is.

The truth seems to be twofold: that a well designed and well managed reactor is pretty safe in the short term but the long term hazards are awful. We have no exact knowledge of safe levels of exposure to radiation. The 'safe levels' proclaimed by the nuclear establishment are continually changing downwards; they reflect what the industry hopes it can work to at any given moment rather than what is demonstrably safe. What is more, there is no demonstrably safe method of disposing of nuclear waste and no way of knowing that any attempted method is unsafe until too late for remedy.

For these reasons the nuclear industry should be phased out. Mr Campbell's projections into the mid twenty-first century are scarcely more respectable than the City's projections of next year's balance sheet. We are probably lumbering the unconsenting people of the thirty-first century, and beyond, with hazards of our making which they, quite possibly, will be powerless to counter and possibly not even understand. We do not own this planet; we are merely resident upon it during our brief and under-informed lives.

While Rome burns it is not important that Nero may or may not have paid a bargain price for his fiddle.


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