So, Max Hastings has come out in favour of a new generation of nuclear power stations. That’ll be the end of that idea, then. Like many other supporters of nuclear power, Mr Hastings is a gentleman of certain age with a history of supporting big, ugly, centralised and expensive solutions to problems we don’t really have. For instance, Mr Hastings was an enthusiastic supporter of the European Union and all its works, and used his position in the commentariat to excoriate the Conservative Party for failing to see the light.
Of course, if the Conservative Party is to embrace nucleoscepticism alongside euroscepticism then it will need more evidence against nuclear than the dodgy record of the nucleophiles. Readers of this blog will recall the recent news that twenty tonnes of highly radioactive uranium and plutonium had leaked from a pipe at Sellafield’s Thorp reprocessing plant. At the time, it was unclear exactly when the leak has taken place. The news, ahem, leaked out shortly after the election and there was a suspicion that things had been hushed up in order to keep nuclear power off the campaign agenda.
But according to the Daily Telegraph the truth is rather is rather more disturbing:
“A serious nuclear leak at the Thorp reprocessing plant at Sellafield may have gone unnoticed by staff for nine months, it emerged last night. More than 80,000 litres of highly radioactive liquid leaked from a ruptured pipe as a result of human and engineering errors before the incident was detected last month.”
As David Willetts, the Conservative energy spokesman, said “this seems like a basic failure of procedure worthy of Homer Simpson.” For those of you who may not be entirely familiar with The Simpsons (such as many of Mr Willetts’s shadow cabinet colleagues), Homer Simpson is an exceptionally incompetent employee at the mercifully fictional Springfield nuclear power station. However, the notion that half an olympic-sized swimming pool of uranium and plutonium dissolved in concentrated nitric acid could go missing without anyone noticing for several months would be too ludicrous even for a satirical cartoon show.
Still congratulations to David Willetts for sounding the first hint of Tory nucleoscepticism.
>big, ugly, centralised and expensive solutions
That sounds more like wind farms than nuclear power to me.
Posted by: Scott Campbell at Blithering Bunny | 02 June 2005 at 14:34