Nuclear will never do UK a power of good over energy crisis as bills soar – Yorkshire Post Letters

From: Martin Hemingway, Leeds.
The Government is coming under mounting pressure to tackle the energy crisis.The Government is coming under mounting pressure to tackle the energy crisis.
The Government is coming under mounting pressure to tackle the energy crisis.

THE rise in energy costs has predictably led the supporters of coal mining, offshore and onshore oil and gas exploration and fracking to demand changes to energy procurement – knowing that the new Police Act will make protest against these illegal.

It has also led to demands for nuclear energy production. All of these will demand subsidy well beyond the “green” subsidy to alternative technologies.

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Last April saw the 20th anniversary of the launch of the Nuclear Fourth Generation Forum, designed to explore new developments in nuclear power.

The Government is coming under mounting pressure to tackle the energy crisis.The Government is coming under mounting pressure to tackle the energy crisis.
The Government is coming under mounting pressure to tackle the energy crisis.

Over 20 years, this initiative has spent billions, with many further billions committed to facilities such as Hinckley Point – “under construction but overrunning on delivery by years, and overrunning on budget by billions.

Over the same period with less subsidy, and less spend, solar energy has increased production from 1TWh in 2000 to 1,000TWh in 2020.

Nuclear is not a cheap solution, it is not even one that would generate electricity for years, all the time operating at a risk to us all, and creating a legacy of toxic and radioactive waste we have not started to deal with. In the interests not only of safety but of financial prudence, we need to be pursuing green technologies.

From: Bill Parker, Shifnal, Shropshire.

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LORRAINE Allanson has long advocated triumph of sense over corruption and I was pleased to note her recent letter.

“Useful fools” is how Mr Putin referred to Friends of the Earth and other protesters whose “usefulness” was partly financed by Gazprom, the Russian state gas supplier.

That was a decade ago when the only UK gas and oil wells that did not have protesters blocking site access were those licensed to Gazprom.

Analysts have also accused the Kremlin of using Gazprom as a political weapon, over the war in Ukraine. This is a story of four decades when politics and fatuity defeated science and ecological conservation – and which now leaves the poor out in the cold.

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