Sir.–I wondered if Douglas Paterson, of Keep Hampshire Green, (Letters, July 3) was actually being serious when he suggested that instead of wind and solar farms, what we need is a thorium nuclear power plant in the centre of every town in the country?

Does he not realise that thorium powered nuclear reactors are just as dangerous as traditional uranium powered ones? Does he not realise that even current nuclear power plants require more subsidy than onshore wind farms?

Does he not realise there is not one single commercial thorium- based nuclear reactor? Does he not realise it will be 20 or 30 years before thorium nuclear power plants have any hope (if any) of producing electricity on a commercial scale?

The community wind farm at Bullington Cross was supported by over 2,840 people from Basingstoke. Each one of us had written or emailed the council supporting it. This was far more than those who objected.

It is a great shame that seven of our local councillors voted to ban our wind farm. We should be grateful to the five who had the foresight to vote for it. Seventy per cent of the UK population want wind farms.

Are Keep Hampshire Green so anti-renewables that they would rather build a nuclear power station in every town in the country? Nuclear is dangerous and expensive. Nuclear is not a technology for town centres.

What we need is better energy efficiency and more clean, quiet, inexpensive wind and solar farms. And we need it now. I wonder how many people would vote for a nuclear power plant in the town centre? I wonder how many of the seven councillors who banned our wind farm would vote for the alternative? –Martin Heath, Hampshire Renewable Energy Co-operative.

 

Sir.–While I am not an expert on the efficiency or cost of wind power, I am conscious of the damaging impacts of reliance on carbon fuel extraction and pollution and especially impacts on the areas that produce and generate our energy.

Happily for people like Mr Paterson and Keep Hampshire Green, Hampshire and Basingstoke have minor experience of that problem, because neither has had to take responsibility for generating the significant amounts of energy we all happily consume.

Of course, parts of this island other than Hampshire suffered for decades from coal mining and are still punctuated with open cast coal mines, with new applications even now.

Slag heaps and layers of black dust still disfigure, huge power stations dominate skylines and high pylons fan out in every direction across the countryside.

Abroad, we see pristine forests, river systems and other landscapes and often self-sufficient communities destroyed for our benefit, low-lying islands being swamped, and increasingly frequent extremes of weather affecting communities in far worse ways than we experience.

This area continues to bury its collective head in the sand by demonstrating that we are not prepared to play our part in curbing our use of fossil fuels or generating at least some energy in arguably less damaging ways.

In our name, our representatives, while being lauded for their rejection of wind power by some, have to my mind demonstrated complacency and a lack of objectivity.

I wish areas producing fossil fuels for us could have the right to refuse planning applications that trash their environment in order to make us realise just how unsustainable the area really is. –Paul Beevers, Church Lane, Cliddesden.