Am I alone in being increasingly turned off by the tone of the continuing controversy about nuclear power? It is a controversy in which statement has been all but displaced by overstatement.
I can sympathise with Steuart Campbell in finding some of the anti-nuclear comment to be obsessional scaremongering. In the short term, the nuclear industry is a good deal safer than, say, the construction industry and a good deal safer than many entrenched practices from cigarette smoking to fast driving along foggy motorways. The well designed well managed nuclear reactor is, in the short term, vastly less polluting than the motor car or the power station based on fossil fuel.
But scaremongering, if that is what it is, is not answered by paranoia - "no other industry has been so misrepresented etc etc". The fact is that many industries give rise to informed criticism and some of this criticism - people being what they are - is simplistic. The industries associated with motor vehicles, nicotine, alcohol, pharmaceuticals, armaments, entertainment, news coverage, to say nothing of the functioning of such professionals as lawyers and architects, are all subject to severely critical comment of very mixed quality.
The numerous and various critics are, of course, mostly "self-appointed"; that phrase is merely a tendentious description of people who feel conscientiously concerned and who exercise their freedom to comment accordingly. Perhaps Mr Campbell is not a self-appointed advocate for the nuclear industry; his resolute refusal to see any validity in any criticism of the industry suggests that he may actually be retained by it. Perhaps he will tell us what is in it for him - a legitimate fee as a PR assistantor merely the joys of being a one-man pressure group.
May I, as one whose career as a working scientist began in a minuscule role in the Manhattan project and went on to researching in the practice of coal utilisation in the electricity generating industry, be allowed to say that I regard the nuclear power industry as, at best, an anticlimax. We all thought, in the late forties, that our heavy consciences about 'the Bomb' could somehow be lightened by producing unlimited cheap electricity from nuclear reactors. Nearly half a century, and billions of pounds, later we have nuclear power that contributes about 15% of the world's electricity at a cost that is unattractive to the consumer. The long term is in no better case; any attempt to expand the nuclear industry rapidly enough to head off a potentially disastrous accumulation of carbon dioxide during the next thirty years or so is likely to burden us with cheaply built reactors in many poor countries of the second and third worlds - countries where environmental considerations are not much in mind and where cheap half-trained labour is plentiful.
If that happens then the "scaremongers" may turn out to have been alert and responsible citizens after all and our descendants will inhabit an environment damaged irretrievably by us. We letter writers will, of course, be safely dead by then.