From Sam Edge
Geraldine Thomas may have misunderstood “public anxiety over nuclear power” (22 August, p 26). I suspect that the problem is simply that from long experience people just do not believe the industry’s repeated attempts at public relations. The endemic culture of secrecy, obfuscation and plain lying about safety incidents doesn’t inspire confidence. Fatuous attempts to rebrand, such as renaming the Windscale reprocessing plant in the UK as Sellafield, haven’t helped either.
From a technical standpoint, the continuing reluctance to fund development of thorium reactors rather than the uranium favoured by the original considerations of generating plutonium for military use is troubling. I don’t believe nuclear power is the bogey that some environmentalists claim. But in its current form neither is it the panacea claimed by those with a vested interest.
Ringwood, Hampshire, UK
