YOUR correspondent, Mr Stowell (December 15) has at least put a smile on my face. He starts his letter by berating a previous correspondent, Mr Woodland, for being factually incorrect. One would assume that anyone making such charges would check their own facts first. Alas no. It would seem the pro-nuclear lobby is in need of a reality check every bit as much as the green lobby. My Stowell states that nuclear power is carbon neutral. If only. The most recent (government backed) study again peddles this myth. Said study based its calculations on activity at each nuclear power station, but ignored the mining, processing and transportation required to supply the fuel in useable form. If these activities are included in the calculations (as they were for coal-fired stations) nuclear power becomes the second most polluting power source, behind coal but worse than natural gas. Uranium and plutonium ores require a massive amount of re-processing to make them useable, and need to be transported in bulk around the world to the places where this processing can take place (yes, Mr Stowell, huge quantities of fuel being imported!). Mr Stowell further states that decommissioning of nuclear plants is now cheaper than at first thought. Really? Could we be seeing another round of selective use of facts? This conclusion can only be drawn by taking safe disposal of nuclear waste out of the equation ? ie, sticking the waste in storage drums and pretending it?s no longer there (note, long-term storage is not the same as disposing). He further stretches the pro-nuclear point by stating that the doomsday scenarios about nuclear safety have been grossly exaggerated. Try telling that to the victims of Chernobyl, and not just those who lived through it, but the families who to this day are experiencing outrageously high rates of spontaneous abortion, birth defects and childhood cancers. I suspect Mr Stowell will think that such an accident could never happen here, so I will end by pointing out that the network of large petro-chemical storage facilities in the UK have been built with a similar level of safety in mind, ensuring that accidents will never happen. Oh, dear. Dave Goodwin 2 Cleave Cottage Sticklepath I SEE that once again Geoffrey Stowell has graced your pages with one of his pro-nuclear diatribes. What he and his ilk seem oblivious to is that global warming is a global problem. This means that nuclear power cannot be the answer. If we choose the nuclear solution, then what right do we have to stop other countries from going down the same route? Nuclear power stations in Iraq? The Sudan? The Balkans? Indonesia? It seems unthinkable, from both a safety and security point of view. Even in this country, can we really claim to know the state our society will be in, in even a hundred years? time, let alone the tens of thousands of years that nuclear waste remains dangerous? As for the claim that nuclear is a carbon-free technology, this is only true if you ignore the fact that the mining and processing of uranium (a scarce resource) itself produces carbon dioxide, as does the necessary back-up plant to which Geoffrey Stowell refers. We have been lucky that so far we have only had relatively minor nuclear accidents around the world, although the inhabitants of Chelyabinsk and Chernobyl might think differently. But who knows what is to come? To cross our fingers and hope that science will somehow produce a solution to nuclear waste, that politicians will somehow produce answers to all the security questions and terrorist threats, that nuclear proliferation can easily be prevented in a world of ever-expanding nuclear power, and that mistakes will never happen in this life, is blinkered beyond belief. Kevin Eady 12 Glanville Road Tavistock