I would like to respond to Robin Latham's periodic dig against nuclear power and promoting windmills.

He says that compared with nuclear, wind turbines are a bargain. They are not. They have a huge subsidy and produce vey little power: during the cold spell last winter approximately one twentieth of one percent was produced by wind.

The subsidy to them, a requirement of the government, is one of the reasons quoted by the electricity producers for the recent increase in the cost of electricity. Each household subsidises wind and solar by over £100 per year.

He says that nobody is prepared to say how much it costs to clean up nuclear. He has trotted out this in the past and I have responded in previous letters. If he took the trouble to search the net for half an hour he would come up with the answer: £70 billion over the next 100 years – and that will provide the stimulus to industry that he fondly imagines windmills might.

I'll repeat the problem with windmills. To produce the same power as a modern power station, nearly 700 of the largest wind-turbines would be required. These are turbines with six times the output of the St Briavels turbine. Current thinking is that these turbines have to be spaced about one mile apart. That means they would need an area about 700 square miles. The forest is about 45 square miles. Get the drift?

I'll finish with a quote from a paper which was presented to Parliament last year by Professors Pierre Noel and Michael Pollitt of Cambridge University:

"The UK energy and climate change policy is failing, and failing at a high cost."

"Electricity bills are going up as consumers are asked to pay for ever-increasing subsidies to renewable energy, the deployment of which does nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions."

– Herbie Renfred, Longhope.