Lancashire professor: nuclear power is safe (From The Westmorland Gazette)

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Lancashire professor: nuclear power is safe

1:54pm Wednesday 23rd March 2011 in Heysham news Photograph of the Author By Chris Hopper, Reporter

A WORLD-leading Lancashire expert has said nuclear power remains a safe option for the future – despite the current Fukushima reactor crisis in Japan.

Laurence Williams, a professor of nuclear safety at the University of Central Lancashire, said the disaster, which followed a huge earthquake and tsunami in the country, should not put the UK off a new generation of nuclear power stations.

The Government has indicated that new reactors could be built at Heysham, near Morecambe, which has produced nuclear energy since the 1970s.

However, in the wake of the Fukushima crisis, which experts are battling to prevent from becoming a full-scale nuclear disaster, public opinion has swung against the energy source.

Prof Williams, a former chief inspector of nuclear installations, said: “It is a challenge for the industry to explain how safe nuclear power is.

“However, this country has got a good record on nuclear safety and the reactors at Heysham are some of the safest in the world, run by a good company with a highly-trained workforce.

“We have got to get things in balance. The chance of a nuclear disaster is something like one in a million, compared with a one in 10,000 chance of dying when you drive your car.”

Prof Williams said the UK’s new generation of nuclear reactors could also offer a huge jobs boost locally.

Comments(7)

viglin says...
4:17pm Wed 23 Mar 11

That cant be the case statistically. I can remember Windscale, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and now Japan, all going wrong. Thats just the ones I can remember, I'm sure there are more than that! At a chance of one in a million how many million nuclear power stations would we need for that number of accidents/incidents to be statistically valid? They just make these figures up as they go along, no one knows how many accidents/incidents they are going to have, but its always "Oh, its a one in a million event". Well its not, its less than one in two hundred at the moment. Its a hell of a way to boil a kettle of water, thats all I can say, and if you want the things to be fail-safe, why not build them all below sea level so you can flood them manually if you really, really need to. Most of the things are on the coasts of countries anyway, just get the reactor and cooling ponds built in a hole in the ground with a bloody big pipe leading from the sea to the reactor site with a couple of manually operated old fashioned valves out of easy reach of local pranksters and anti-nuclear activists and "Robert's ones Uncle" as they say. Better still spend the money used to build the things on free and compulsory cavity wall and loft insulation for everyone and you probably dont need them at all.