The risks of nuclear power are too great

Many readers will remember David Cameron’s solemn commitment for his government to be “the greenest government ever” under which wind energy, photo-voltaic generation and tidal power would thrive. The 2010 Conservative manifesto was festooned with glossy photos and encouraging descriptions of the success that such technologies were having on continental Europe.

We now are benefiting from renewable energy from off-shore wind farms, but the much cheaper terrestrial wind generation has been subjected to deliberately throttling planning regulations since 2015. Some Conservative MPS found them so visually offensive that they preferred electricity

generated by means which increased greenhouse gas emissions or left highly radioactive wastes, toxic for millions of years.

Despite praise in the 2010 Manifesto there are no plans to make use of the enormous potential of tidal power from readily available sources such as the Severn estuary and Swansea bay. The briefly generous “feed-in tariffs” are no longer paid: they used to pay householders for electricity fed into the grid when not needed within the house.

The technology which has received warm endorsement by Conservative governments through to the present is nuclear power, which produces waste which, the British Geological Survey reminds us, remains seriously toxic for many thousands of years. Despite over 60 years of nuclear reactor use in this country, we still have not established their safe disposal. For years the increasing quantity of this poison has been accumulating at great expense in putatively secure, heavily guarded facilities.

Like all human technology, nuclear reactors sometime go wrong: remember Windscale/sellafield, Chernobyl and Fukushima. The present threat to the Zaporizhzhia reactor in the Ukraine clearly demonstrates the nuclear danger in a “conventional” war.

The government is presently building a new nuclear reactor at Hinkley Point to our west and is planning another at Oldbury to our east. If the map of the contamination, control and exclusion zones for (say) Chernobyl are centred on Hinkley Point, the potentially large area and enormous population badly affected by a serious accident at Hinkley is seen to include all of the North East Somerset constituency. Of course devastation could be much wider than this and,

depending on wind direction and speed, could easily include Bath and Bristol, Cardiff and Newport, to say nothing of Bridgwater and Weston-super-mare.

This is not all. Small modular reactors (SMRS) are being developed. “The UK government believes that SMRS could play an important role alongside large nuclear as a low-carbon energy source to support a secure, affordable decarbonised energy system. SMRS are smaller in size and could use modular, off-site manufacturing for flexible deployment”.

The danger is not just of accidental damage: this country has lived with a terror threat level of “severe”, “substantial” or “critical” for most of the past 16 years. The government is ever urging the public to take the terror threats very seriously. We know that terrorists have been capable of crashing large aircraft into vulnerable buildings. Might a nuclear reactor, especially a poorly protected small modular reactor of the type that senior politicians seem so keen on, be an attractive terrorist target?

David Packham Timsbury