a nuclear power plant? This is what we are being told. It is one of the reasons given for not going down the nuclear route. "It will take too long and it will be too expensive" is what we are being told but is this really true?
There was an interesting letter in this morning's paper. It was from someone I have met. He is a bit of an eccentric but he rarely has his facts wrong. He will have checked. In this case his father was involved in what he was saying as well.
His letter was about the Calder Hall nuclear plant in Scotland. It was apparently started in 1953 and finished in 1956. The intended life-span was twenty years. It apparently lasted forty-four years.
That sounds good but it also needs to be recognised that the plant was there primarily to produce weapons grade plutonium. Supplying power to the local community was "just a useful consequence". It was a small plant and it did not produce anything like the amount of power produced by the large modern plants of today.
All that said however one of the suggestions here has been that small plants could be of some value. One of the reasons for this has to be a small plant could serve to provide power to a region without the expense of trying to set up much larger plants to serve perhaps an entire state. Downunder is a very, very big country. It is the world's largest island or smallest continent. Vast amounts of it are sparsely populated - and likely to remain so.
So now surely we have some questions. Does it really take ten years to build a small nuclear reactor? Do they really only last twenty years? Is there really nowhere safe to store the waste? Is nobody working on the problem of how to reduce the waste? Do they really cost the amount we are being told they cost? How many people have lost their lives to nuclear accidents compared with accidents caused by other means of power production? What are the other environmental risks?
I could go on but the man who wrote the letter is not a fool. Yes, there is more to the story than there is in his letter but it should surely be making us think. Is our anti-nuclear stance really about the things we are being told about - or is it because more money is to be made elsewhere?
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My husband is a physicist and had some collegues who worked in the field of nuclear power plants. But they all changed their subject in the 1990s when it became clear that nuclear power had no future here. There has been no research here for more than thirty years. And the last very modern, very safe nuclear reactors were shut down last year, even though they could have continued working. Instead we have coal-fired power stations, which are the dirtiest way to create energy.
Hilde in Germany
Follow the money? It would have made more sense to put money into research!
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