Nuclear not the future

Wales needs jobs and increased power generation, both of which appear to be met by Hitachi's purchase of Horizon Nuclear Power, which has the rights to build reactors at Wylfa.

But the possibility of 6,000 jobs being created in construction of the power station and 1,000 more to running it should not prevent sober assessment of the project.

Hitachi was responsible for design of the Fukushima plant in Japan, which went into meltdown last year following an earthquake.

Its "advanced boiling water reactor design" involves a technology not yet given the green light in Britain.

In common with US nuclear plant builders, the company has to look for design projects outside its home territory because neither Washington nor Tokyo is prepared to countenance the political fallout from commissioning new nuclear facilities.

Hitachi has only been able to buy Horizon because its German owners RWE and E.ON acted in accordance with Berlin's decision to abandon nuclear power after Fukushima.

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Post-Fukushima realism has already seen a European Commission "stress test" report reveal hundreds of problems at 143 nuclear reactors in the EU, with repair estimates of up to £20 billion.

Welsh Secretary David Jones insists that Fukushima was a one-off because of its location in an earthquake zone, but there has been a constant stream of nuclear accidents, many of them covered up by the authorities.

In any case, whatever the often exaggerated case for civil nuclear power being "low carbon," there remains no provision for radioactive waste produced by the process other than encasing it deep in the ground in the hope that it will remain undisturbed for hundreds of years by which time it will lose its toxicity.

The nuclear safety alert generated by the weather conditions linked to hurricane Sandy illustrates that climate change could bring about extreme situations for nuclear power stations.

Private companies are entrusted with building nuclear power stations and operating them - and are guaranteed their profits and shareholder dividends - but they are utterly dependent on the state to indemnify them against the cost of possible disasters.

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Energy and Climate Change Secretary Edward Davey gushed about Hitachi's "decades of expertise" and responsibility for "building some of the most advanced nuclear reactors on time and on budget," but he had little to say about Fukushima.

The more that politicians cling to a technology that is expensive, potentially dangerous, closely linked with a military nuclear programme and dependent on overseas raw materials, the less priority they give to a genuine low carbon strategy based on renewable energy.

Prime Minister David Cameron pays lip service to renewables but cannot compare with, for instance, Germany, which has pushed up its share of renewable energy production from 3.6 per cent of electricity generation in 1990 to 25 per cent by this year.

Denmark has been even more impressive, with renewable energy production hitting 40 per cent of power generation this year.

Cameron speaks with forked tongue, declaring "passionate" support for renewables, while undermining the case for them by insisting that they must be "financially sustainable," which would prove an insurmountable hurdle for nuclear power.

Politicians should move beyond the unpredictability and danger of the nuclear age and embrace fully the case for renewables.