Letters: Nuclear safety

Published on Friday 25 March 2011 16:19

John Connor (Letters, 25 March) suggests that people living near nuclear power plants be trained in taking iodine tablets as part of being "educated in the potential dangers".

I am all in favour of education in the facts about nuclear power. For example, the amount of radiation released by nuclear reactors is, per kwh produced, 4,025 times less than that released by coal burning ones.

Even the release of radioactivity at Three Mile Island, very similar to that in Japan, has recently been acknowledged by no less than George Monbiot, the high priest of eco-scaremongering, as insufficient to harm an asthmatic ant with some heavy shopping, albeit it took him 32 years to say it.

By any objective test nuclear is certainly hundreds and arguably thousands of times safer than any practical alternative and the dishonest scaremongering of Luddites has cost the human race four decades of inexpensive power.

Neil Craig

Woodlands Road

Glasgow

Professor Anne Glover (Letters, 25 March) has clearly explained the process by which Professor Salter won the Saltire Prize.

Earlier this year, Kerr MacGregor, the erstwhile Scottish National Party energy spokesman, suggested that we pump up salt water from the sea into dammed-up mountain corries to create back-up storage capacity for intermittent wind-generated electricity.

Professor Salter has recently stated that using high altitude reservoirs might not, in fact, be necessary, and quoted Loch Maree as an example of how a large, low-altitude freshwater loch could be converted to salt water pumped storage.

Could Professor Glover please tell us what prize she would suggest that Alex Salmond might bestow on either of these two gentlemen for the total destruction of the freshwater ecosystems involved?

I'll be shedding salt tears for the lost biodiversity the day she does. Will Mr Salmond still have a smirk on his face?

Ron Greer

Blair Atholl

Perthshire