THE warning just issued by Naomi Hirose, president of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), to be prepared for a devastating nuclear accident in the UK, as reported in much of the UK national press last week, comes as no surprise to those of us who have been campaigning about the dangers for decades. 

Here at STAND (Severnside Together Against Nuclear Development) we have tried repeatedly to warn authorities of the consequences of pressing ahead with new nuclear build.

We have written many times to various agencies and authorities along the Severn, including the Mayor of Bristol, but it is clear from those few replies we have had that there are no tangible plans for a mass evacuation of the area.

It is hard to imagine the whole of the Forest of Dean, South Gloucestershire, and the whole of Bristol – all of which lie within the 30km evacuation zone that was imposed at Fukushima – as a wasteland.

Hundreds of thousands of homes uninhabitable, some of them possibly for thousands of years. It seems like a scene from a post-holocaust movie.

Yet it has happened at Chernobyl, it has happened at Fukushima and it would happen here if there was an accident of similar severity at Oldbury.

Incidentally, loss or damage from radiation is explicitly excluded from all household insurance policies.

You might imagine that the likelihood of this happening is remote, but this is not the case. We recently asked a leading international epidemiologist and statistician, John Urquhart, to look at the chances of an accident of the severity of Fukushima occurring again, and he found that they were a staggering 200 to 1 in the lifetime of any one nuclear plant.

The nuclear industry meanwhile tells us they have "learnt from their mistakes" and modern power stations have improved safety systems.

Yet the nuclear station that Horizon and Hitachi are going to build at Oldbury is of a relatively new and untested type.

The dangers of the proposed station at Oldbury are particularly hard to calculate as it is to be built on a flood plain that was devastated by its own tsunami in the 17th century.

By the way, Hitachi built one of the stricken Fukushima reactors and Horizon has never built one at all!

The consequences of Fukushima-on-Severn are so catastrophic – where would over a million people go? That, whatever the odds, it is not worth the risk. It is time to stop ignoring the very real dangers because we have swallowed the lie that "the lights will go out without nuclear"

We publicly challenge district and county councils and the Mayor of Bristol to start drawing up evacuation plans now – or better still, join us in trying to stop this headlong rush into madness.

– John French, for STAND (Severnside Together Against Nuclear Development).