THE NUCLEAR OPTION

What did the world look like ten thousand years ago? Any idea?

Not easy to imagine, is it? Very few people can describe what the view from your window would have been 10,000 years ago, and even then it's mostly guesswork.

How about a million years ago? Now, there's a challenge. Imagine what your local area looked like one million years ago. Can you do that?

Okay, let's try something different. What will the world look like one million years from now?

Oooh, that's cruel. Shall we try looking just 10,000 years into the future?

Makes your head hurt, doesn't it?

But it's important, because radioactive waste from nuclear power stations remains extremely dangerous for 10,000 years. Some isotopes are still a hazard for one million years!

In terms of nuclear waste management, experts admit that they are capable of planning one hundred years ahead.

So - every nuclear power station is generating incredibly dangerous waste products and we have no real idea of how to protect that hazardous waste. That stuff will still be horrendously dangerous when all our current civilisations have collapsed, when all known languages have ceased to be.

Addled idiots like VVASP seem to assume that the answer to our looming energy crisis is nuclear power.

That's right. They'd rather inflict a million years worth of danger on the planet than have a windfarm somewhere a bit near where they live.

A wind turbine can be erected, and dismantled, in roughly a day. Every scrap of energy involved in its production, transport and commissioning is recouped within its first year of operation. Which means that, for the remaining twenty-four years of its optimum working life, a wind turbine produces 'free electricity' with no harmful by-products or side-effects.

It's the cheapest energy going. The US and China have been investing heavily in this phenomenal resource. Wind power is the way forward - it's the future.

We don't even know how expensive nuclear power is. We don't know, because no one's yet had to deal with the problem of one million years worth of nuclear bio-hazard.

No one has yet been killed by a windfarm.

Do I need to mention Chernobyl?

The old ways of generating electricity are showing their age. Gas - do we really want to be dependent on Russia for our power? Oil - running out.

Coal - the recent legal ruling concerning the Kingsnorth protesters has ensured that, in the eyes of the law, coal-fuelled power stations are an environmental nightmare. 'Clean coal' exists - in theory. But it hasn't yet been tried out in practice, and it may prove to be impossible, or too expensive, to work.

Which leaves nuclear and renewables.

Leaving aside the hysterical, and utterly nonsensical remarks of VVASP's silliest spokesperson, that the Lenchwick Windfarm with 'kill the Vale countryside' (there have been few more stupid remarks in the debate than that one), one thing is for sure:-

Windfarms produce cheap, clean energy and leave no horrors in their wake.

And nuclear power?

Only a clear and present danger for anything up to a million years.

So which is the more sensible option, hunh?