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Letter to The Scotsman

Written by Editorial
Sunday, 15 March 2009
Nuclear power, yes please IT IS a well-established pitfall of politics that sometimes when you ask the people what they think, they come up with the wrong answer. That is the dilemma facing Alex Salmond after his government quizzed 3,000 Scots on a variety of issues, including future energy supplies. The SNP is proud of its long opposition to nuclear power, a policy it acquired at a time when fears were high about the resultant waste and there was popular distrust of the industry in the wake of the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents. Two decades on, the SNP remains thirled to its anti-nuclear policy and says it will use devolved planning powers to block any new stations north of the border. The problem for the First Minister is that the Scottish people, unlike the SNP, seem to have moved on from the gut fears of the 1970s and 1980s. Many thousands have depended on the industry for jobs. And many more are more worried about being able to switch on their lights in future than they are about radiation leaks. They are right to be worried. A nuclear-free Scotland will be unable to meet its own future power needs and will be a net importer of electricity - unsatisfactory enough as part of the UK, but intolerable and expensive under independence. Renewables may well be the long-term answer, but they will not meet our needs for many decades and nuclear could play an important role in plugging that gap in the meantime. Most Scots have woken up to that fact. It is time their government did too.

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