Joined up thinking - or - playing with fire?

We held my daughter's birthday party at "Rope Runners" in Kelvedon Hatch on Saturday - a perfect excuse to visit the ex-government nuclear bunker which is on the same site, and has always held a fascination for me since it opened its two ton steel doors to the public a few years ago.

Its musty corridors and displays were a chilling reminder of the years when we all lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation, a fate we're thankfully safe from since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Or are we?

It seems to me that sometimes we're just a little short sighted when it comes to this sort of thing. I read an article after 9/11 about "black swans" - unpredictable events that we look back on, pointing our fingers at various agencies and individuals, screaming "you should have seen that coming!". In some cases people do see it coming, but nobody listens or takes them seriously because they're too busy worrying about which B-list celebrity has cellulite. And in some cases nobody sees it coming at all, like this whole volcanic ash fiasco. One piddly little volcano (it is a relatively small one, we're told), and the whole of Western Europe's air transport system is grounded. Just wait 'til its Daddy wakes up - a very likely occurence, so the geologists tell us. What will happen then?

I don't wish to be a portent of doom, but let's look at a few possibilities. Scientists in the nuclear energy industry are forever reassuring us that nuclear power is completely safe, environmentally friendly, and A Good Thing. Apart from the all the deadly mucky stuff left over at the end that they don't know what to do with. But let's not worry about that, we'll just dump that in a poor country somewhere. No, modern nuclear power stations are completely safe, we've learned the lessons from Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, and we've fined Magnox for the 14 years of radioactive leaks from Bradwell in Essex, so it will never happen again.

But just imagine that i'm a terrorist, with an imagination. Instead of hijacking an airliner and flying it into a skyscraper, this time I'm gonna charter one myself, and fly it straight into a nuclear power station. Or, imagine some kind of disaster that creates a huge tidal wave, one that makes the boxing day tsunami look like a splash in your bathtub, let's say, a medium size comet landing in the middle of the sea. Now that's something they tell us will happen sooner or later, we just don't know when. But when it happens, not only would we have massive destruction to contend with, but what's gonna happen to a power station on the coast when it's under 100 feet of water? I wonder what their contingency plans are for that one? Once the flood waters have receded and we're breathing a sigh of relief that we're still alive, we all start dropping dead with radiation sickness. Nice.

So, as you've probably guessed, I'm not a big fan of nuclear power. Give me wind farms, solar power, tidal energy, anything you like as long as it doesn't involve splitting atoms. And in the meantime, I really must drop in on that bloke who owns the bunker at Kelvedon Hatch. I wonder what he likes to drink?