IN contrast to the views of Mr Cusack (December 5), I was delighted to see that our politicians have at long last begun to understand the reality of the energy situation left to us by nearly two decades of drift and dither by successive governments.
Obsessive concern under emotional lobbying on the shakiest of grounds by the Green lobby to achieve an arbitrary reduction of carbon dioxide (incidentally a vital element in the process of photosynthesis on which all plant life depends), and the promotion of the myth that atomic energy is the work of the Devil, has misled politicians and public alike to place an utterly undeserved trust in (and truly massive subsidies to) so called renewable sources of energy.
This has failed to provide us with a guaranteed supply of electricity through the winter and if there are power cuts this year or next this will be made uncomfortably clear. This lame substitute for a policy has raised the cost of domestic power to a quite unnecessary level. We are stuck with this situation for the moment, but the recent decision to go ahead with the Hinkley Point development and now the news about the site at Wylfa is to be welcomed, although both these should have been on the table at least ten years ago along with at least five others.
If the North Atlantic project had been judged on purely technical and commercial merits it would never have been proposed. It was only the anticipation of massive subsidies both for development and subsequent operations that it ever saw the light of day.
Large parts of both the developed, developing and indeed third world are currently eagerly seeking to enter the mature Age of Atomic energy –indeed it is believed that plans are at some stage of development for some four hundred installations around the world.
Fundamental facts of the market, physics and meteorology mean that renewables can never provide a reliable, secure and economic base load of public supply. Nuclear can, has done, and must be allowed to take that role back, and the Government must back that.
My energy policy for the UK would be to cease all new subsidies to the speculative renewables projects, and reduce eventually to zero the ridiculous over-payments to established installations, leaving them free if they wished to do so to compete in an open market for the supply of electricity to the grid – or to use it privately for their own purposes.
Geoffrey M Stowell