Letter: Nuclear fallout

IT IS unfortunate that Tim Flinn (Letters, 28 March), while regaling us with the spectacular claim that each kwh of nuclear electricity costs more in disposal than "the number of particles in the universe", didn't say how this figure, incredible even by the normal unexacting standards of Luddite scare stories, was calculated.

I invite anybody promoting anti-nuclear fears, from Scottish Renewables to the SNP, to at least dissociate themselves from such nonsense if they ever want anything else they may say, on any subject, to be treated as credible.

On the one point where he gives a figure - that reactor radiation remains dangerous for 150,000 years - he is wrong. The most radioactive isotopes decay the fastest. (That's what being most radioactive amounts to). About one cubic metre of waste per year is generated by a power plant. It needs to be kept away from people. After ten years, the fission products are 1,000 times less radioactive, and after 500 years, they will be less radioactive than the uranium ore they are originally derived from

Neil Craig

Woodlands Road

Glasgow