I WOULD like to answer Tom Cousins' questions in his letter 'A radioactive legacy' in the Review.

'Will we be paying £200 million/year for the hundred years it takes to decommission a nuclear power station?' The answer is no, that is the cost of storing waste on all the sites until it is conditioned, which is planned to be within 10 years of site no longer generating. After that site maintenance costs are likely to be c. £2 million a year per site. If we look forward 20 or 30 years when all the current sites are likely to be shut down, that equates to a total of £40 million per year for all the current sites.

This highlights another problem with regard to nuclear power of the politicians' making. The costs above assume that waste is stored at each site; it would be cheaper and better to have one central repository. For over 20 years the nuclear industry has planned for one site to store waste. Politicians of all parties have refused to face up to identifying a site and allowing work to start on it. Storage is a political and not an engineering problem, but unless and until such a repository is built and the industry demonstrates it can store waste safely those opposing nuclear power will maintain that it cannot be stored safely.?I would point out though that a nuclear site starts producing waste as soon as it starts generating, so in the UK waste has been stored safely since the 1950s.

Mr Cousins then asks how nuclear plants can be made safe.

Several countries have decommissioned sites back to green or brown field sites. Fifteen reactors either have been or are being fully dismantled.?As I mentioned in a previous letter, worldwide the preferred approach is to remove the majority of activity in the first few years after shutdown (greater than 99 per cent of the original inventory) and then wait for the radioactivity to decay and use conventional methods to dismantle the reactors.?Berkeley Power Station is the best example of this in the UK.

Mr Cousins' final point is that RWE has pulled out of building stations at Oldbury and Wylfa for commercial reasons and not as I suggested political reasons. Neither or us can be sure, but I will suggest a political factor. RWE are a German company and do a significant amount of work for the German Government (Germany, France, the US and several other countries have an idea that it is a good idea to place work within your own country. Despite any EU regulations). Angela Merkel sang the praises of nuclear power prior to 2010, but realised that the coalition of her Christian Democrats party with the Free Democrats was in trouble in early 2011, leaving Merkel forced to find an alternative partner. The Green Party are the most likely candidate. She declared that Germany would abandon nuclear power after Fukushima in 2011. Which must have helped her prospects with the Green Party. Incidentally, 'abandoned' in this case means by 2022, and Germany will continue to import electricity from?France, which is 75 per cent nuclear. So if you are RWE and if your main customer dislikes nuclear, it has to be a good idea not to be involved with nuclear.

– Herbie Renfield, Longhope.