Tonight in coastal Suffolk a public meeting will take place on a subject more vital than anything that hangs on next month’s General Election.

Politicians both local and national will speak, but they won’t be seeking votes. The meeting was arranged before the election was called and its repercussions will extend a lot longer than the next five years.

It’s a matter literally of life and death. Potentially the lives and deaths of thousands, maybe millions, not yet born. Lives that may be centuries – possibly many centuries – in the future.

The question at issue is nuclear power. Specifically, whether or not a new reactor should be erected at Sizewell.

No one at the meeting in Woodbridge – where the chief guest speaker will be Baroness Jenny Jones, who represents the Green Party in the House of Lords – has the power to give Sizewell C either the red or green light. But they can make the public more aware of an issue that affects all our lives, and will do so more than many realise.

The building process could cause huge disruption locally. The aftermath could be grave over a far wider area.

Some quite serious people argue that nuclear power is necessary to help us meet our commitment to curbing carbon emissions and slowing global warming. It should give pause for thought that the one party that makes environmental issues its top priority thinks otherwise.

It is true that the age of fossil fuel is drawing to a close. And none too soon, either. The evidence has been around for a long time – and is now overwhelming – that burning coal, oil and gas in great quantities has a devastating effect on the world’s climate.

Humanity’s addiction to oil has caused wars and economic calamities too, but that’s almost a side issue.
So we need, desperately, to move on. But to what?

There are numerous possibilities, some of them quite exciting. What is required is a mix of energy sources. All feeding into the system, no single one so dominant that its failure would bring the whole system down. Or so powerful that whoever controls it controls everything.

Wind power is perhaps the most obvious, the most visible, right here right now. Frankly, I don’t understand those who object to it. No, it can’t provide all our needs, but then we don’t want it to – and it can make a valuable contribution.

As can solar power – even here. The Nevada Desert could power North America. Given the political will – and currently unfeasible co-operation between nations – the Sahara could probably power Europe.

Our rooftops could heat our homes. Our black road surfaces could generate a lot of the power it takes to travel on them. Then there’s wave and tidal power, and geothermal energy. There are even possibilities in rainwater. It’s all there, just waiting to be tapped.

Some of it may sound futuristic, but any of it could be on-stream a lot sooner than Sizewell C. Almost certainly at a fraction of the cost.

Endlessly renewable sources could already be powering everything we need if the billions poured into the great nuclear experiment had been spent instead on the right research and development.

Switching now from nukes to renewables would surely provide more jobs. And it would do all that without creating piles of deadly waste no one knows how to get rid of.

Without the risk of an East Anglian Fukushima or Chernobyl.

• The free public meeting “Sizewell C and Suffolk’s Environment”, looking at the local effects of the development plan, will be at 7.30 this evening in Woodbridge Community Hall.
• For more information on the issues, see sagesuffolk.com

On the shores of Lake Athabasca in Saskatchewan, around 500 miles north of Saskatoon, the capital of the Canadian province, stands the town of Uranium City. It’s a place with a certain bleak, remote romance about it and a fascinating, though short, history. 

Beginning in the 1950s as a settlement mostly of scattered tents, it began acquiring buildings and community services in 1960. Until 1982 it had around 5,000 residents. Now it has 201. The mines which gave it its purpose – and its name – are gone. But not forgotten. 

And not really completely gone either.

One, the Gunnar Mine, on the sweetly named Crackingstone Peninsula, 16 miles from the centre of the “city”, ceased production in 1963 and was abandoned the following year. It had been worked for just eight years, first as an open-cast site, then as a deep pit. The surface buildings, including the winding-gear, were finally demolished in 2011.

The work was part of Project Cleans (Cleanup of Abandoned Northern Sites), a multi-million-dollar project “to assess and reclaim Gunnar Uranium Mine and Mill site, Lorado Uranium Mill site and 35 satellite mine sites in northern Saskatchewan”. It’s a project that still has some way to go.

In November, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission approved part of a plan by the Saskatchewan Research Council to “remediate” the mine. Or, as reported last week by the Saskatoon Star Phoenix, “to clean up 4.4 million tonnes of radioactive tailings”. 

“Tailings” are mine dumps consisting of rock and effluent generated in the processing plant. This is essentially a huge radioactive slagheap. The old mine itself is flooded and also needs a deep clean.

The estimated cost of decontaminating the site has ballooned since the project was announced. In 2006, it was expected to cost $24.6 million. The current estimate is $268m.

It’s unclear who will foot the bill. It’s become the subject of dispute between the Canadian national government and the government of Saskatchewan. 

The company that ran the mine won’t be shelling out. It went out of business long ago. Not nearly as long as the problem it left is going to be around, though.

As  nuclear chemist Ann Coxworth of the Saskatchewan Environmental Society says: “Planning for centuries ahead is never easy”. 

The present plan is for the tailings to be buried beneath “more than a metre” of earth. This, Coxworth says,  is “as good as it can get at a practical level”. Whether it’s anywhere near good enough is a moot point.

Pointing out that the site’s remoteness is no excuse for not cleaning it up, she asks: “How do you balance the cost against the moral acceptability of it?” How indeed.

And this seemingly intractable problem is in Canada, one of the most economically sound and well governed countries in the world. Imagine how much worse this sort of problem is in India, Gabon, Congo, Niger or almost anywhere else uranium is mined.

And this is just the old mine. The radioactivity in the tailings is about three times the radioactivity of the uranium that went off to the reactors. 

And what about the radioactive waste from the reactors? After a few decades it’s still thousands of times as radioactive as the uranium that went in, and it’ll be highly dangerous for thousands of years to come.  

As my brother Clive – a qualified nuclear physicist – asks: “Who do you trust to dispose of it properly? Or even to have the faintest idea of how to dispose of it properly?”

This is not just a distant Canadian (or Indian, or Congolese, or Chinese) problem. It’s very much our problem too.

And worth pondering very seriously at a time when there are finally real hopes for tidal power (see Swansea Bay). When the technology of solar power is improving so rapidly (despite governmental stalling and obstruction). And when Dutch railways have just announced that they are running entirely on wind power.
 
 
 
Trumped
 
 
Just occasionally, fake news can be brilliant. And very occasionally the TV listings pages are really worth reading. The Scottish Sunday Herald ticked all those boxes at the weekend.

TV writer Damien Love’s summary of Friday’s President Trump: The Inauguration begins: “After a long absence, The Twilight Zone returns with one of the most ambitious, expensive and controversial productions in broadcast history.”

 He adds: “The story begins in a nightmarish version of 2017 in which huge sections of the US electorate have somehow been duped into voting to make Donald Trump president. It sounds far-fetched, and it is, but as it goes on it becomes more and more chillingly plausible.”

And he concludes: “It’s a flawed piece, but a disturbing glimpse of the horrors we could stumble into, if we’re not careful.”

I really, really didn’t want to add again this week to the noise surrounding Trump. But journalistic genius deserves its due. Love’s full brilliant column can be found here.

Remember Fukushima? It was big news in March 2011 when the nuclear plant was overwhelmed by a tsunami, causing multiple reactor meltdowns. The world’s attention has turned away since then.

But there’s still a no-go area where 150,000 people used to live. There’s still at least several decades of work ahead decommissioning the devastated plant. And the wider long-term effects are still incalculable.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company originally estimated that dismantling the plant would cost about £16million. Last week the Japanese government revised that figure to £82billion – plus another £20bn to remove radioactive topsoil, trees and buildings.

As soon as those figures were released, experts were warning that they were still over-optimistic. But all this playing with numbers is really just evidence of our obsession with money ahead of anything that actually matters.

As science journalist Madhusree Mukerjee says: “I find it hard to believe that this plant can be cleaned up at all, no matter how much they spend on it.

“The molten cores will be too dangerous to get near to for half a century at least. Plus, Japan has no repository for high-level nuclear waste, and given the earthquake danger, it is unlikely to ever have one.

“All that contaminated topsoil – where will they put it? It just sits around in plastic bags and gets dispersed again each time there is a typhoon.”

Meanwhile, closer to home, there’s this news, which was not as widely published as it might have been.
Since 2000, convoys carrying nuclear weapons along UK roads have had 180 “mishaps and incidents”, including collisions, breakdowns and brake failures.

Not a lot of people know that. The fact that you now do is just one reason to be grateful for the Freedom of Information Act.

You may think I’m being ignorant or ingenuous here in linking a story about nuclear power with one about nuclear weapons – but I’m not. The two are inextricably linked, and not just by the dangers that apply to both.

There is really no plausible reason to invest in nuclear energy other than its covert role in making material for weapons. Which is why if we’re to calculate the true cost of Trident renewal, we should also factor in the enormous sums the government seems willing to pour into Hinkley, Bradwell and Sizewell.

Though that, of course, is to repeat that potentially catastrophic error of trying to put a cash value on things too big and dangerous to be measured in terms of mere finance.