Price of power

Professor Stephen Salter (Letters, 25 October) accuses me of being "dishonest" in saying that whereas the cost of our windmill power is being cut from 9p to 8p per kwh the French nuclear equivalent is 1.3p and requests that I inform him where the figure came from. I was responding to a previous article in The Scotsman about a proposed reduction in wholesale windmill prices to the grid and gave the equivalent French price, to the grid.

This came from the World Nuclear Organisation, whose website lists the production cost of French nuclear as 2.54 cents,which correlates to slightly under 1.3p. Perhaps Prof Salter may wish to acknowledge his error in confusing retail prices with wholesale.

Keeping the lights on is arguably the most important issue in British politics today. However bad the credit crunch may be, it does not compare with what will happen when they go out. Nor is the fact that 24,000 pensioners have been dying, quite unnecessarily, every year from the effects of fuel poverty, a figure expected to nearly double this winter.

As the previous Scottish Lib Dem leader, Nicol Stephen, said on television: "Nuclear is the easy solution." He went on to explain that it thus must be prevented from working, or the public could not be frightened into subsidising windmills. Prof Salter can confirm this as he was Mr Stephen's co-speaker at the time.

Reactors can be built in four years, excluding paperwork and if we do not have them by 2015, when new EU emission controls will close much conventional power, we will have massive blackouts.

NEIL CRAIG

Woodlands Road

Glasgow

Stephen Salter's assertion (Letters, 29 October) that nuclear energy is "a forced, unsecured, interest-free loan from our descendants" overlooks the fact that nuclear waste is rich in the exceedingly rare precious metals ruthenium, rhodium and palladium.

The short and medium-lived isotopes will have mostly decayed within 1,000 years, leaving only the long-lived (and much less radioactive) ones.

As this material is not much more radioactive than the original uranium ore, it is manageable and our descendants will be eagerly digging up nuclear waste repositories to get at this treasure trove. One day our "loan" might well be repaid in full, with interest.

(DR) STEPHEN MORETON

Marina Avenue

Warrington, Cheshire