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Written by Neil Craig
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Tuesday, 15 January 2008 |
This was in reply to a rather silly but long letter
giving all the normal Luddite anti-nuclear scare stories. A slightly
re-edited version of the original letter is in today's Scotsman to
which I have also sent a re-edited reply.
More to nuclear than how best to brew a cuppa
In the first line of his long letter, David McEwan Hill says nuclear is
"an unnatural, highly dangerous and highly expensive way of boiling
vast amounts of water". It is somewhat unnatural. Nuclear reactors are
only known to have occurred once in nature (in Gabon during flooding
several thousand years ago).
Of course windmills do not occur in nature and are thus even more
"unnatural". It is, however, a lie to say that nuclear is dangerous -
it is, in fact, orders-of-magnitude safer than coal since coal kills
150,000 people a year and total nuclear deaths in the past 20 years
were two in one accident in Japan - or to say that it is expensive,
since there can be no denial that France has been producing nuclear
electricity at half the price of coal and one-quarter that of wind.
Indeed, in pointing out that China and India are expanding their
nuclear programmes, Mr Hill would clearly have to explain why they
would do so if it were more expensive. Are these governments involved
in some secret conspiracy to run their countries incompetently?
Mr Hill must be assumed to be unaware that the purpose of electricity
generators (nuclear, coal or gas) is not to boil water - that is a
side-effect - but to create electricity.
Neil Craig
You may be interested in my political blog
http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/
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Last Updated ( Friday, 18 January 2008 )
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