Be careful what you wish for when it comes to nuclear power - Yorkshire Post Letters

On September 16 you reported PM Sir Keir Starmer expecting a UK-US partnership to bring “a golden age” of nuclear power. Your accompanying editorial gave nuclear a similar welcome. Be careful what you wish for.

True, a nuclear power plant takes up little room and reliably produces carbon-free electricity. But it does so at the cost of toxic nuclear waste and the very real risk of a disastrous nuclear accident.

Radioactive waste remains dangerous for 100,000 years, i.e. a thousand centuries. By comparison, one of our earliest identifiable ancestors, King Iry Hor of Upper Egypt, lived a mere fifty-one centuries ago.

Britain’s nuclear waste is largely contained in Sellafield, Cumbria, behind lead-lined glass a metre thick. But accidents can happen. Small-scale nuclear accidents, including several at Sellafield and Dounreay in Scotland, are surprisingly common and usually unreported. The largest are very different and the worst ones are well known.

The USSR was very secretive about what happened at Kyshtym in September 1957, but it seems likely that hundreds died. At Three Mile Island, USA, an accident in March 1979 caused cancers and cost US$973.

The worst ever nuclear accident, at Chernobyl, Ukraine in April 1986 resulted in 400 deaths, cancers and a cost of $700bn. The disaster in Fukushima, Japan, in March 2011, caused by an earthquake and a tsunami, killed 573 people and caused many cancers.

Now the Sellafield container is full and leaking into the ground. So I’m wondering where Sir Keir will put the lethal legacy of his golden age.