I WOULD like to respond to Herbie Renfield, 'Nuclear realities', Review March 23. He confidently trotted out facts and figures for nuclear technology, planning law and economics. The economics aspects raised one of my eyebrows highest.

A nuclear power station having £300 million indemnity cover is as close to having no public liability as makes no difference.

I've been asked to have £5 million pounds worth to do an art project in a school, Herbie you're having a laugh, 60 artists working in schools are not a comparable risk to society as operating a nuclear reactor.

This week the Ukrainians are trying to raise another £1 billion to put a new concrete casing on Chernobyl (the existing one is about to collapse apparently, and the Ukraine doesn't have enough cash to fix it so we'll be chipping in because if it did collapse we might be downwind). I doubt anybody could give you a figure for what Chernobyl has cost since 1987.

Are we still paying for Chernobyl contaminated Yorkshire Dales sheep to be dumped in nuclear waste storage sites?

The £300 million level of indemnity you quote would make Fukushima look underinsured; end cost £300 billion? According to Wikipedia the 1979 Three Mile Island incident had cost $1billion in clean up costs and $2.4 billion in property damage up till 1993. Does the cost of these three accidents alone match total global renewable energy subsidies over the same period?

I hope the Government is subsidising renewable energy with £2 billion a year as you claim. In the Budget Osbourne announced a £3 billion pound taxbreak for oil and gas drilling, all energy productions are subsidised at multiple points in their lifecycles. I imagine the cost of maintenance of nuclear waste containment sites currently cost the British tax payer at least £2 billion every year, Gordon Brown gave them a 'one off payment' of £20 billion for containment upgrade a few years back. (He is said to have described nuclear power costs as 'eye watering'). They'll be back for another 'one off' £20 billion upgrade soon – it's that time of the decade, inflation adjusted no doubt.

The final clean up costs of Hinkley and Berkeley are unknown. It won't be EDF or British Nuclear Fuels Ltd paying the final bills though. Will it take 100, 1,000, or 10,000, years of public subsidies before the sites are made safe, or will they poison the local population off first? Any implication that renewable energy is disproportionatly publicly subsidised compared to nuclear energy is utterly absurd. The final bill for today's nuclear power is unknown, but to make the eyes water of future government chancellors of exchequer for the rest of time.

The question I would ask is why Conservative, Liberal and Labour politicians appear to oppose new nuclear power in opposition, then silently change their minds in office? Is it corruption, military nuclear proliferation, or using new power stations as a fig leaf to disguise the 'eye watering' costs of nuclear power station clean ups from the public for as long as possible? Or a classic blend of all three?

Nuclear power, no thanks.

– Tom Cousins, Coleford.