Mrs May must scrap Hinkley C for good
renewables, we will still need gas back-up and fossil-fuel generation combined with CCS. If there is a case for nuclear, we should look to more feasible projects, such as the smaller-scale nuclear plants being planned in Wales and Gloucestershire by Japan’s Hitachi. We need a coherent industrial-energy strategy and, hopefully, thanks to Mrs May’s intervention, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy will have time to provide it, with the cancellation of Hinkley C as its first action. PAUL SMITH, Green Square Renewable
Energy, Tunbridge Wells, Kent. WITH the confusion over Hinkley Point’s latest promised reactor, the murky military history of the nuclear industry should not be forgotten. In discussions about British nuclear power after the postponement of the Hinkley Point C project, the Calder Hall plant at Sellafield (then called Windscale) has been wrongly described as ‘the world’s first full-scale nuclear power station’. It was, indeed, opened by the young Queen Elizabeth on October 17, 1956, but it was never a commercial nuclear plant. This was clearly stated in Kenneth Jay’s remarkable 1956 book entitled Calder Hall: The Story Of Britain’s First Atomic Power Station. He wrote: ‘Major plants built for military purposes such as Calder Hall are being used as prototypes for civil plants . . . the plant has been designed as a dual-purpose plant to produce plutonium for military purposes as well as electric power.’ In fact, the first — nominally commercial — reactor at Hinkley, the Magnox ‘A’ plant, was LETTER OF THE WEEK operated for military production purposes, too. The first public hint came with an announcement on June 17, 1958, by the Ministry of Defence, notably not the Ministry of Fuel and Power that oversaw the civil nuclear programme on ‘the production of plutonium suitable for weapons in the new [nuclear ] power stations programme as an insurance against future defence needs . . .’ in the Hinkley reactor. A week later in Parliament, Paymaster General Reginald Maudling told MPs: ‘At the request of the Government, the Central Electricity Generating Board has agreed to a small modification in the design of Hinkley Point and of the next two stations in its programme so as to enable plutonium suitable for military purposes to be extracted should the need arise.’
Dr DAVID LOWRY, senior research fellow, Institute for Resource and Security Studies,
Cambridge, Mass, U.S. TO CALL a nuclear power station like Hinkley Point C a carbon-free option is to discount the carbon cost of the build. Every cubic centimetre of material that goes into the building of such a vast high-tech project will have a carbon cost. Cement production is very energy hungry, while quarrying and transporting gravel for concrete requires vehicles to be built for its transportation and fuel from the Middle East. The list is endless of the special materials and equipment that will be developed and installed, but the carbon cost of all of it should be totted up and set against the supposed gain of nuclear-derived electricity. How long will the power station be producing energy, being managed, maintained and serviced, before it becomes carbon-neutral, and then into profit? I suspect it will be more than half of its working life, if ever. And then, at the end, comes the dismantling and disposal problem. More carbon used. Carbon-free? I think not.
GERALD R. KIMBER, address supplied.