Radioactivity is not susceptible to antidote or neutralisation by chemical or microbiological means; unlike fire, it cannot be extinguished; unlike flood, it cannot be dammed against or pumped away; it is intractable and, in so far as it is dangerous, it is intractably dangerous. There are but two things you can do with significant masses of radioactive elements; you can concentrate them to make a local hazard or you can disperse them to make a 'pop up anywhere' hazard. In either case the hazard, be it great or small, is likely to be of a long term nature and certain to take its own course in its own time.
We know very little about safe limits of exposure to radiations; these limits are arbitrarily defined, and revised, in accordance with the the best practice of which the industry is capable at any given time. As technology has improved, over the last fifty years or so, these limits have been defined more and more stringently. It is scarcely unreasonable to assume that, if technology advances, future operators will be horrified at the crazy risks the 1990's aplogists for the industry were prepared to take - on posterity's behalf.
That is the crux of the nuclear debate - not what slight risks are we to take with ourselves but what possibly huge and cumulative risks we may be taking, in presumptuous ignorance, on behalf of our unconsultable descendants? These descendants may be technologically accomplished and thus able to cope with any messes we bequeath them; they may be ignorant savages with no idea of what they have been lumbered with.
Because of the Caithness dump issue, this is an ethical problem of peculiar importance to all of us in the North and its resolution calls for a long-term reverence for the people of the future and for the planet on which they will live out their lives. One cannot help but wonder whether the Home Mission Committee of the Aberdeen Presbytery might be better engaged in addressing this substantial matter of real moral concern rather than getting into a lather about a legendary Satan, supposed witches, silly spells and pretend seances. Is it future realities or past superstitions that loom larger in the mind of the Kirk? We should be told.