Letter: Call for efficiency

In your editorial on electricity generation (30 March) you neglected to mention the step that would most increase energy security, create green-collar jobs and reduce fossil fuel dependence: demand reduction.

Up to a third of the energy we use is wasted, and cutting that waste can benefit our health, wellbeing and productivity. Since each pound invested in energy efficiency saves up to ten times as much carbon as each pound spent on new generation, it's also the cheapest way to tackle climate change.

So as Scotland's political parties publish their election manifestos over coming weeks, the credibility of their energy policies must be judged in whether they prioritise energy saving over profligacy, not whether they favour one form of new generation over another.

Chas Booth

Association for the Conservation of Energy

Carpet Lane

Edinburgh

Neil Craig (Letters, 29 March) demands calculations to prove my assertions about the true costs of nuclear waste. Here they are.

Assumptions: that the annual price per unit for waste management is 1/100p; the average annual inflation rate is 5 per cent (the post-war average); the number of years that waste has to be supervised is 150,000; known technology; compound interest formula. Interest = 0.05(1+5/100) x 150,000 = 0.05(1.05) x150,000 Log interest = log 0.05 = 150,000log1.05 = 3,177.093831 interest = 10 to3,177p.

This shows that just one unit of nuclear electricity will cost 1 followed by 3,175 zeroes.

It means that the next 5,000 generations of humans will have to pay for one unit of power used already by this generation.

Now, multiply that figure by the billions of units to be generated and you soon end up with a sum many times larger than the number of atoms in the universe. How fair is it to make our children pay our such impossible bills?

Tim Flinn

Garvald

East Lothian