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Letter to the Eastern Daily Press |
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Written by Alan Shaw
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Thursday, 12 October 2006 |
Tony Maughan lacks perspective. He is probably unaware that for very
many years after WW2, when UK electricity generation was almost
entirely dependent on deep mined coal the casualty rate in the British
coal extraction industry was typically 1,000 miners per annum. Very
many of these were fatalities. The UK nuclear station construction
programme not only saved the lives of hundreds of miners. It focussed
attention on safety not only inn nuclear but all power station
matters, For example the death rate on all power station construction
sites, which had averaged one man per year per power station, was
reduced to practically zero.
The advent of "clean conditions working" in factories engaged in
making nuclear station components spread throughout
conventional manufacturing to the benefit of the whole labour
force, The Three Mile Island PWR accident twentyseven years focussed so
much attention on safety in the USA that the PWR reactor design is now
a highly simplified completely fail-safe reactor. No British nuclear
power station has ever had a serious accident. The 1957 Windscale
fire occurred in one of two primitive "piles" designed solely to
produce military plutonium at the start of the Cold War with the Soviet
Union. Both piles were permanently shut down immediately after
the 1957 fire.
The Soviet Union's Chernobyl reactor accident in the Ukraine twenty
years ago was the result of a bizarre operator error in a reactor whose
design would never have been licenced for construction in the UK.
NNC, the British firm which designed and built all UK nuclear
power stations, has for many years cooperated with the former
Soviet Union in making safe the remaining reactors of the Chernobyl
type.
Alan Shaw
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