We need more honesty on nuclear power’s long legacy of hazardous waste | Letters

Tom Smith, William Walker and Neil Smith respond to Samanth Subramanian's long read on the enormous task of dismantling Sellafield

Samanth Subramanian captures perfectly the vast scale and longevity of the effort needed to clean up Sellafield (The long read, 15 December). As Britain and other states with nuclear power industries grapple with how to go about an effective, safe and economical nuclear clean-up, it might be better to explain the challenges with less reliance on suggestions that in its early days the nuclear industry never thought about decommissioning (though the point has validity). Instead, we need more honesty about the fact that nuclear power inescapably generates large quantities of hazardous human-made waste, the worst of which will remain hazardous probably beyond Homo sapiens' time on the planet.

The industry's solution to this is a network of deep disposal facilities. But none have yet been created, their cost is enormous and there is no certainty that they will perform the long-term task required of them. These are considerations that sadly receive little attention in current debates about the need for new nuclear-generation capacity.