Your correspondent David McEwan Hill seems to want to reduce the debate on nuclear power generation down to how best to brew a cuppa (January 14). There is a great deal more to it than that. Throughout the world, for example, there is vast export potential for nuclear desalination plants in a world growing short of fresh water owing to climate change. An appropriate metaphor might be to argue that there are an awful lot of potential Scottish jobs down the drain there.
Neither is the world running out of fuel for reactors. There are vast untapped thorium reserves throughout the world and particularly in India, which is already building thorium-burning nuclear plants.
On the vexed question of radioactive waste, 96% of the spent fuel can be turned into new fuel. The 4% of the waste that remains is also reusable. This includes cesium-137 and strontium-90 that could be separated out for use in medical applications such as sterilisation of medical supplies.
Using isotope-separation techniques and fast-neutron bombardment for transmutation, we could separate out isotopes for use in medical testing and treatment.
Scotland imports around 90% of its medical isotopes, used in around 3000 medical procedures daily. These nuclear isotopes could be "mined" from the so-called waste. This debate has a long way to run yet.
Alan Clayton, Westfield, Letters Way, Strathlachlan, Argyll.
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, 200 Woodlands Road, Glasgow.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article