Nuclear is far from safe
May I reply to N Waddecar’s
response (Climate change has turned into a tax tool, Viewpoints Aug 22) to my letter of the 17th? I fear perhaps we may both be guilty of over-simplification in trying to deal with difficult issues in a couple of hundred words. I could correct several apparent misunderstandings, but let me confess to misleading them - I mistakenly referred to mudslides in Sierra Leone rather than Liberia.
More importantly they poohpooh “scaremongering” saying “... the British nuclear power has been safe and efficient since 1956”.
Safe, really? What about the Windscale leak and later fire of 1957 and continuing pollution of the local mud? Or the 1996 Dounreay and Sellafield leaks of 1998 and 2005 at the Thorp reprocessing plant?
And efficient? Years ago I visited Wylfa on Anglesea where they boasted they ONLY heated the Irish sea a couple of degrees locally. Low carbon? When they use thousands of tons of concrete and vast building programmes?
And costs? The government’s own website confesses: “The 2017 forecast is that future clean-up across the UK will cost around £119 billion spread across the next 120 years or so... However, forecasts for work ... over the next century are inevitably uncertain: the future is impossible to predict”.
Of course, there are many factors driving climate change. But I’ll stick with the safe opinion of 97 per cent of those who should know and are clear human activity and fossil fuels are causing potentially catastrophic climate change. Claire Green, Manchester