The website shows pictures of what ANY town near to a nuclear plant, waste dump, or research facility could look like when things go wrong.

Fraid you're wrong, Charlie.

It shows what can happen with an undermaintained and poorly-designed reactor with criminal negligence by employees. That model of reactor isn't used in the West, simply bcos it's too damn dangerous if something does happen (as it did). And even then it would never have happened but for criminal negligence by the operators. Russia never gave much of a damn about people or environment though. Waste dump - well, you'd *really* have to try hard, and even then you won't get much to happen. The Japanese incident didn't manage to do much more than break some windows with the bang and kill the people immediately by the tanks, and that was caused by the silly bastards ladling the stuff around in buckets, instead of using the proper reprocessing equipment! Research facility - very unlikely, given that the scientists know the effects better than anyone and are consequently the *most* likely people to be cautious!

Re "unexplained increased incidence of cancer", it happens all over. There's a leukaemia hotspot at Sellafield, but apparently no increase in other sorts of cancer. There's also a whole bunch of cancer hotspots around Britain which don't have any obvious environmental cause. And there's a bunch of nuclear plants with no hotspots round them. People have found an effect, but whether its cause is the plant or random chance has never been shown.

To declare my interest, my dad was the environmental officer at BNFL's reprocessing plant at Salwick. I'm pretty damn aware of how dangerous this shit is. I'm also pretty damn aware of what people in the West go through to keep this stuff safe, since the accidents in the early days of nuclear power.

Just a note re the "government misinformation". While my dad was there, Greenpeace and FoE did a hydrology study on a model of the Ribble estuary, which they said showed that there was radioactive build-up occurring in some places in the estuary. BNFL then commissioned a study (in which my dad was involved) to see whether this was true or not, by examining the actual estuary instead of models. Turns out that (a) there's no build-up, and (b) the models were so inaccurate a representation of the actual movement of water in the estuary as to be useless. Trouble is that "Nuclear reprocessing plant is safe after all" doesn't make much of a headline...

Sure, worry about the pollution from nuclear plants. But also worry about dioxins, heavy metals in soil and groundwater, radioactive emissions from coal-fired power stations (oh yes, you didn't know about that?), sulphur from coal-fired power stations causing acid rain, volatile organic compounds from gloss paint, etc, etc. Everyone in Britain (and most of the way round the world) knows about the Windscale fire, but hundreds of people in Lancashire and Cheshire being evacuated from their homes because of chemical leaks in nearby petrochemical plants doesn't make more than the local news unless it's a very slow day. Why? bcos chemical plants aren't big news like nuclear.

Brucie, I agree that it's not irresponsible to say that nuclear plants can go tits-up if they're not run properly. Nor is it irresponsible to say that a coal-fired plant, an oil refinery or a petrochemical plant can go equally badly wrong, or that power lines can fall down. All those keep the real risks in people's minds. But it *would* be irresponsible to say that power lines should be banned because they could fall on people and kill them, no?

Graham.