Nuclear power is an unnatural, highly dangerous, very inflexible and highly expensive way of boiling vast amounts of water. It burns the ultimate non-renewable fuel: grade-A uranium, of which the world has very limited reserves, less than 20 years at best estimates. With China, India and other countries intending to commission up to 100 new nuclear power stations, these reserves will shrink at an increasing rate and we will then be in an era of extracting uranium from low-grade ore at increasing power cost, moving on to other, even more technically challenging and expensive, ways of preparing other materials for the nuclear process.

In the interim, we will produce more and more hugely toxic nuclear waste, yet we still have no idea of how to deal with it. There are no safe ways of burying nuclear waste. Perhaps we can shoot it into space.

Generating electricity by nuclear power is the ultimate political quick fix. Future generations will pick up the bill for cheap, mistaken decisions taken today. While there is an impending power crisis in the south of England which militates towards the nuclear quick fix, no such imperative faces Scotland.

No serious person is suggesting that wind power can provide anything other than useful and fairly modest supplementation in percentage terms to other methods of generating power - but significant nevertheless in an array of other green methods of supplying us with constant and reliable electric power.

The proposed Severn Barrage could provide as much generation as up to eight nuclear power stations. The potential of the Pentland Firth dwarfs this. We have clean-coal technology, tidal power generation in its infancy , biomass, solar power and hydro power, and increasingly sophisticated means of storage. We should be looking at ways of encouraging localised generation by any of the these methods to produce power close to the source of consumption and send surpluses on to a national grid.

Government support for these would be a far better bet than the monumental sums poured into the nuclear industry as subsidy.

All that is lacking is the political will to invest, now, the huge sums of money that will guarantee future permanent, cheap and clean power.

This Scottish Government has the political will. Time to equip it with the fiscal powers.

David McEwan Hill, 1 Tom Nan Ragh, Dalinlongart, Sandbank, Argyll.

Scottishpower's success in obtaining approval for the Harestanes windfarm near Moffat produced a statement to the effect that it confirmed "the major role that such projects have to play in delivering targets for and making a real difference to climate change".

If only this were true. The claimed saving in carbon dioxide emissions of almost 500,000 tonnes each year equates to the amount of CO2 produced by just three 747 jumbo jets flying both ways across the Atlantic each day for a year. Yet we cannot depend on the wind and are approaching the point where wind-generated power has to be backed up by conventional fossil-fuelled generators "spinning" in reserve: an operating state which is inefficient and perversely increases CO2 emissions. Faced with the growing problem of transport emissions, the contribution wind generation makes is as useful as a teaspoon to empty the Atlantic.

It is probably unreasonable to blame the power companies since the politicians have delivered a lucrative sweetener in the form of the renewables obligation financed by increasing the price of electricity to consumers. We cannot expect a privatised power industry to pass over a profitable opportunity as an altruistic gesture to save our scenery. The problem lies with the government's energy policy, which is designed to give the appearance of acting responsibly, but in reality is a cowardly avoidance of implementing effective measures which would be deeply unpopular with the electorate. For the present, every reasoned objection to windfarms has to fail because it would confound "meeting renewable energy targets". Future generations may weep and yet they may not know what they have lost - Scotland's unique selling point: its matchless scenic beauty.

Norman McNab, 14 Branziert Road North, Killearn.