UK Nuclear power programme has just gone up in smoke.

     There is a long established protocol for dealing with accidents at nuclear power plants.   First. the authorities insist there is no possibility of radiation escaping and that the public shouldn't worry.  Then various nuclear experts appear on television saying that this accident shows just how safe nuclear power really is because it can withstand earthquakes and tsunamis.   As the reactors explode one by one we are told that the detonations don't mean much because the nuclear containment vessels cannot be penetrated.   Until they are.  But even then we are told not to worry because any radiation leak will be less than background radiation in the granite city of Aberdeen.  The final act is always the same.  It emerges that nuclear fuel rods have been exposed,  radiation is pouring into the atmosphere, and that there is a potential catastrophe in the making.


   At the striken Fukushima Daiichi plant in northern Japan, selfless power station workers risk their lives to try to put out the nuclear fires.  Last night it emerged that radiation at the nuclear power station had reached at a critical level of  400 millisieverts an hour.  The normal 'safe' dosage of radiation is 100 milliseverts A YEAR, according to the World Health Organisation.  The plant managers were reduced to hosing sea water from fire engines onto superheated reactors cores in a desperate attempt to prevent a meltdown . Then one of the fire engines runs out of fuel.


 And so history repeats itself as tragedy as well as farce.   Windscale, 1957, Three Mile Island, 1978 and Chernobyl, 1986 and now in Fukushima Daiichi. This, though, must be the ultimate nuclear nightmare:  a disaster of epic proportions in the country, Japan, which has led the world in the development of supposedly safe nuclear power generation.    We don't know what is going to be the final fate of Fukushima Daiishi - but one thing we do know for certain:  civil nuclear power is finished. This is the end of the nuclear dream.  It finally died when the third explosion ripped through those innocent-looking concrete blocks on Tuesday 15 March 2011.