I would suggest that John Sandalls (Oxford Mail, March 28) needs to get his facts right about nuclear power.

Nuclear power has always been the most expensive way to generate energy, with the most recent cost per kilowatt hour for nuclear being 2.7p compared to 1.6p for onshore wind.

There is no long term solution to nuclear waste. It just accumulates and becomes more deadly. Yes, we can store it underground but it remains radioactive for a thousand years and seepage over that period of time is inevitable.

The latest estimate of the number of deaths caused by Chernobyl is not 50 but 985,000 spread across the whole of Western Europe.

All our energy needs can come from renewable. Tidal power is totally predicable, as is geothermal, and the variables such as wind and solar are easily balanced out by the national and international electrical transfer grid and measured hydro feed in.

The Government is indeed ignoring the advice of Government sponsored reviews of our energy needs, all of which concluded that nuclear should be phased out as it is too expensive and potentially dangerous.

A new range of nuclear power stations will cost billions of the public’s money. The estimated £67bn to build them will be added to your electricity bill.

Decommissioning now costs the taxpayer £1.6bn per year.

Building 10 new stations will add to this bill – which will be met by the taxpayer.

Insurance for a Chernoby-style disaster will be picked up by the Government.

If EDF in France had to insure for the full cover, the cost of electricity would increase by 300 per cent.

Billions have already been set aside via the new Green Investment Bank (again, taxpayers’ money) to provide loans to the company which wants to build the new generation of nuclear power stations.

The cost of protecting the stations against terrorism will also be met by the Exchequer.

There has been a string of serious accidents at nuclear plants. The International Nuclear Event Scale lists 21 serious incidents from 1950-2000.

This letter would go on for pages to list them, but a full record is kept by the UK Nuclear Installations Inspectorate, the most serious of them being the one which lead to the closure of the Thorp reprocessing plant in 2005 when 83,000 litres of highly radioactive waste leaked out.

Calder Hall did have a major incident in October 1957 when a massive radioactive plume was discharged after a fire in the reactor. It came to light 25 years later.

As for there being no deaths from radiation... well, tell that to the vast numbers of local campaign groups around British nuclear power stations who are fighting legal battles relating to hundreds of deaths.

The facts speak for themselves: nuclear power is dangerous and costly.

Investing in renewables is the way forward.

David Williams, Green councillor, Oxford City Council