HIDDEN AGENDA

Another local periodical has entered the debate about windfarms.

The Vale Magazine reaches some 60,000 readers across the Cotswolds and the Vale of Evesham. In their July 2009 issue, they published an article, entitled 'A Breath of Fresh Air', by 'Environmental Scientist' Dr John Sandalls. The subtitle was 'Is windpower fuelled by hot air and is nuclear the real deal?'

Dr Sandalls poured cold water all over the issue of wind-generated electricity, claiming that 'the costs of manufacture and erection are not insignificant' and that 'On grounds of reliability, wind scores no points at all.'

Could this Dr John Sandalls, 'Environmental Scientist', be in any way related to the John Sandalls who, in 2004, published 'Thirty-Six Years at the Atomic: My Time at AERE Harwell, 1958-1994'?

THAT John Sandalls is as passionate advocate of nuclear power ... just like the Dr John Sandalls who, in the article published in The Vale Magazine, argued that 'it is a pity that short-sighted political objectives and groundless fears over safety ever interrupted our original nuclear programme'.

It was precisely that argument that John Sandalls advanced in his book about working at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE) Harwell.

You see, basically, Sandalls is an embittered man. He resents the fact that Harwell ceased to be a major centre of research into nuclear power.

And of course, being fanatically pro-nuclear, he has no time for the 'greens' and such 21st century energy solutions as windpower.

Like all scientists who are still stuck in the last century, Dr Sandalls steadfastly downplays the real threats inherent in nuclear power, such as the fact that no one - I repeat, NO ONE - has the foggiest idea of how to protect dangerous nuclear waste for very long.

On 15 April, the secretary of state for energy and climate change (Ed Miliband) released a document which contained a list of 11 sites which would 'welcome' new nuclear power plants. All of these sites are on the coast - which, if global warming leads to what pretty well every expert says it will, is hardly safe. Four of the proposed sites - Bradwell, Hinkley, Dungeness and Sizewell - are at risk of flooding (according to the Flood Hazard Research Centre at Middlesex University), and wasn't it Sizewell which recently managed to detect, by accident, a radioactive leak which had been going on for fifty years?

This is what Dr Sandalls wants (presumably because, otherwise, all his happy years at Harwell would have been a total waste of time) - more nuclear power stations, more threats to health and security, more damage to the environment and more hazardous waste which someone (God knows who) will have to safeguard for hundreds of thousands of years.

So the costs of windfarm manufacture and erection are 'not insignificant', hunh?

What about the costs of nuclear power stations and their waste products?

Anyway, that's all beside the point. What matters is that The Vale Magazine published the views of an 'Environmental Scientist' who doesn't give a crap about the environment. Getting an apologist for the nuclear industry to write about windpower is like getting someone from the BNP to write about immigration.

So - more fuel to the liars and myth-mongers of VVASP who, just like John Sandalls, will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern world.