Hinkley C and the BBC

Powerful letter from Dr Ian Fairlie, independent nuclear consultant (http://www.ianfairlie.org/about-ian-fairlie/) to the BBC - shared by Angela Paine, a leading campaigner to stop a new nuclear power station being built on the Somerset coast (http://stophinkley.org/) and local green activist:

Sirs

Your programme on Hinkley C (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04n67xn) was perhaps one of the worst-informed, biased and misleading I've heard in a long time.

Have you no independent researchers who could dig a little deeper on this contentious matter?

Why no discussion of the truly extraordinary construction costs - £24.5 billion - and rising? This is more than double the cost of the 2012 UK Olympic Games...for one power station. And the mindboggling price support subsidies, estimated at another £35 billion over the life of the station assuming it is ever built? These have been severely criticised - even by Conservative politicians and bankers.

And the fact that the EPRs [nuclear reactors] under construction in Finland and France are in serious legal, technical, and financial difficulties? Both projects being years behind schedule and £billions over budget?

And the fact that the EPR is an experimental design and may not even work in practice, given its over-reliance on myriads of untested computer programs?

You and your colleagues may say that nuclear is low carbon, but this is naive: of all the methods of generating  low carbon electricity, nuclear is the least economic, by some margin.

For heaven's sake, where was the balance in your programme?

Yours in anger

Sadly, another thing to be cross with the BBC about! If you heard this R4 'You & Yours' programme last week, please consider joining Ian in contacting them with your thoughts / complaints...