Text 7: the slow death of nuclear power

Britain’s Greens are celebrating. They believe the nuclear age is coming to an end.

The government has decided not to include British nuclear power stations in the privatization of the electricity industry, and it has dropped plans to build three new nuclear power plants costing £6 billion. Furthermore, a government energy forecast predicts that by 2020 nuclear power will be a largely spent force, with the nation using less than it does.

This all amounts to a major U-turn by the British government.

Britain has 18 nuclear power stations providing 17 per cent of the country’s electricity. But nuclear power is costly. The electricity it produces is three times more expensive than power from a station burning fossil fuels such as coal and oil. At the end of their active lives, nuclear power plants cost much more to dismantle safely than they do to build.

Unhappiness in the City, where nuclear power was viewed as a high cost, high risk industry, threatened the success of the electricity industry on the stock market. Public confidence in the safety of nuclear power has also been hit hard.

“I think Chernobyl was the turning point in shifting public opinion against nuclear power,” says John May, author of The Greenpeace Book of the Nuclear Age. “What happened there disproved all the claims that nuclear power was safe.”

Other countries have cut back their use of nuclear power as well. In the USA no new reactors have been built since the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in 1979. Since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, 20 nuclear plants ordered or under construction in the former USSR have been cancelled.

In Australia, Austria, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, New Zealand, Portugal, the Philippines and Norway, governments have adopted non-nuclear policies.

“Even if everything was closed down tomorrow we would still be living with the legacy of nuclear power for the next 500 years. No nation has yet solved the problem of what to do with nuclear waste,” claims John May.

Greenpeace went to develop environmentally-friendly ways of producing electricity: harnessing the power of the wind, waves, rivers and using ‘geothermal energy’ from deep within the earth.

Text 8: complacent public blamed for worsening drought.

Britain’s thirsty homes

There is no such thing as a free bath, according to the Water Minister, increasingly worried at the risk of taps running dry.

A national review of water consumption and conservation, prompted by the drought in the South East, will try to end the notion that water is free.

A change in people’s attitudes is regarded as the key to successful management of water demand, which is rising alarmingly just when supplies are threatened by the worst drought of the century. The fact that moat people in Britain pay a standing water charge which does not rise with the amount used increases the tendency to see water as a ‘free good’

The logical implication of the wish to change the consumers’ attitudes would be the introduction of water meters, which are used in most of Europe but are still regarded with hostility in some parts of Britain as some people think they would discriminate against poor people with large families.

The government is assessing results of a number of three-year metering trials, the main one being on the Isle if Wight, where saving exceeding 10 % have been reported in domestic water use after installation.

Text 9: the tragedy of the floods in florence

On 4 November 1966, after extremely heavy rain, the river Arno in Northern Italy finally overflowed its banks and caused great loss of life and destruction of homes, as well as extensive damage to the countless art treasures which the city contained. It was not only one of the country’s most serious natural disasters; it was also an event of tragic proportions for those people all over the world who saw this beautiful city as the very symbol of Western culture.

What happened:

Although flooding on this scale has occurred only twice before in the history of Florence (in 1333 and in 1344), it was clear that it could happen again. Consequently, the city council had to take certain measures.

Damage caused: