market. why don't was really happening to the global economy with much stronger for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines. what an argument for moscow here's a look at the top stories from morial events are on the way to mark twenty five years since the world's worst nuclear accident explosion at a true novel power plants and radiation across many parts of europe as being remembered in some of the most affected areas in your brain russia and belarus. nato nations are been refused of arming reviews rebels even before the uprising require qualified in is reaching dead long as gadhafi forces continue to lay siege

to the city of misrata while nato airstrikes target a close compound in tripoli. russian security forces say they've prevented a suicide attack and have killed several militants in a terror crackdown in the north caucasus some of those killed are believed to be linked to russia's most wanted terrorist don't whom are. also the top stories next what is the shadow of turn all bull shark li in focus and her parents nuclear crisis present danger asks whether it now is the time to consider a world without atomic energy. well. bringing you the latest in science technology from the realms. we've got the future covered.

hello again a welcome to spotlight. today my guest in the studio is steve thomas twenty five years ago the explosion that true. life in the u.s.s.r. showed us the back side of what was believed to be the cheapest cleanest source of energy thousands of people were affected and acres of land laid waste that case later when the world thought it left the tragedy far behind that dreadful tsunami hit make nuclear plant in japan and here we are again trying to make an informed choice between a new clear and a non-nuclear world or maybe it is possible here's a professor of energy studies at the university of greenwich stephen tanks. in the twentieth century energy has become

a key to successful economic development the cheaper energy required immense natural resources like rivers of fossil fuels that's where nuclear energy came to rescue cheap and during and ecologically clean it seems to be a big for all decision but the explosion meltdown of the chair normal nuclear power plant in soviet ukraine many enthusiasts in the world but still couldn't stop mankind in its misuse of the cheap energy many nuclear power plants have been built and are being built now and even the latest nuclear accident in japan. reverse the low. poll a professor thank you very much for being with us and i would like to start with the. true novel how shocking was the news of the nuclear plants for a specialist for scientists did this scientist word about

a possibility of such a thing. i think it was very shocking i think that it was something that people knew could happen but thought probably never would happen so the fact that it did happen on such a terrible scale was a dreadful shock for me it was not no longer a theoretical possibility it's not something that that might happen it really had happened and there was no disguising that and the scientists knew that there are things like that can happen so so you did where needed were in the public you didn't when the governments there there are things like there are possible i think that people realized the meltdown for possible i don't think they realized the fundamental flaws with that particular design a reactor that could go out of control in that way well the initial reaction of the soviet government was to cover the instead you remember that even in key year where the really a very high it was announced only after the part of the may. and after

a meeting like of the second and third of may and people went to swim and they need to reverend go out and their families and so on what was the reaction in the worst different for example did the reaction of the u.k. government did the. immediate alert or what they also didn't want to do to to to cause panic over the reaction varied from country to country i mean in britain it was a fairly open process but for example in france magically the nuclear cloud turned a sharp left a mist france completely according to the french government so i think there was. it was fairly open in the u.k. and there was a degree of. smugness almost that this was a a soviet design of reactor and now designs were much superior and couldn't possibly been that sort of thing. well. the shock after that to

nobble nuclear power plant accident it took nuclear power off. and the agenda in many countries is the true i'm not sure that is true i think again if you go back to three mile island the big previous accident people date the end of ordering for nuclear power in the united states to three mile island and blame it on that actually it was economics that stopped nuclear power not three mile island similarly in chernobyl i think it was a convenient excuse when things were going badly run for nuclear power to say it's all down to churn a bulletin there's not problems with the technology itself let's blame it on churn a bill and the same will happen with a consumer so so so you so it's the economic that started what kind of economic world well the problem in the united states thirty years ago was that nuclear power

plants were coming on line years late three or four times over budget. and regulators the people that set the electricity prices were fed up with having to raise electricity rates by fifty percent sixty percent when a new nuclear power plant came online if they come forward today there has been talk of a nuclear in a science now for ten years. and that was based on a promise that you could build a big reactor thousand megawatt reactor like russia build for a billion dollars the latest estimates for that sort of plant or something like six billion dollars in only ten years and before we've even started to build them the cost estimates have gone up six fold so it'll be convenient to say their innocence was killed by from kashima but it was going badly wrong because of the economics because the plants were proving much more difficult and expensive to build than than was expected so the theory that these were the ordinary people the

prior to the citizens protests grouse fruits diplomacy. things like that that stops their nuclear programs it's rubbish it actually actually has nothing to do nothing to do with the real situation this is so the world is governed by money. i have no problem with people going on the streets and protesting but people's attention span is very short focused shima won't be news in truth three months time but instead will be ten years before the regulations are quite handsome well you're. being used for a very long but it'll pay off the front praises around the world. what will last will be the effect on people that lend money for nuclear power plants and that's what's killing their power now nobody wants to lend money because it's economically risky well let's take their a closer look at the tree narwhal disaster in reported by spotlights he learned in

media. only of these people appearing in the soviet mews real do not here now gets to leave their homes for good escape from the terrible disaster the town of prepared built in one thousand nine hundred seventy was only expected to grow and flourish the bow three here was exceptionally high the soviet union there were each population by youn employees of the two noble power plant twenty fridays ago the town was in a bar so now it's a ghost part of the so called zone overly a nation and the silent witness of what was described as two worst nuclear catastrophe in world history the disaster came as a result of a human error a juror in a systems test on the plant a series of explosions were to highly radioactive smoke fall out into the atmosphere the poisonous come out from the plant eventually spread over large parts

of europe. evacuation from prepared did not happen immediately a soviet authorities initially tried to cover up the catastrophe people in the soviet union were on the informed of the disaster three days after it happened it's believed the firefighters who arrived to try to extinguish the fires did not fully understand the danger they confronted at least twenty eight emergency workers died of radiation poisoning and hundreds of others face serious health problems there are still debates as to how many people had their house damaged as a result of the truly noble disaster figures vary from thousands to hundreds of thousands of protesters raised concerns about the safety of the nuclear power industry in many countries for years after the church noble disaster building nuclear power plants was out of the question. steve is it true that disasters like three mile actually novel have

a positive effect they realize the safety requirements have you come across as a true. do they have this positive it's a very difficult question to answer because the problem is that you solve yesterday's problem with the new design features which is not a bad thing but history doesn't tend to rerun itself and it's the next problem that you have to worry about the the things that went wrong at fukushima were not things that went wrong at three mile island or another bill so they do raise a safety but. maybe they won't stop the next accident now we have a way it will go back to your previous point the more safety you put into power plants and there were powerful gets the higher the cost and here again we come to a situation where nobody would like to invest in a little bit because this to expensive is their true this is not what the nuclear

industry ted said ten years ago when it talked about the renascence we look at the u.s. department of energy is site it says talks about this new generation of reactors that would be safer but because they were being designed from scratch they would be simpler and cheaper so the idea was that by stripping away all these layers of safety that you had it on every time you had an accident and going back to square one you could get the same or better levels of safety put a lower cost because it was simpler and in a sort of home waving way that made sense but the reality is that when they come to class these reactors out try to convince the regulators that they are safe it turns out they're just as expensive or maybe more expensive than the old ones so there was this illusion that you could get cheaper reactors if you went back to basics and redesigned it with all that you've learned in mind you could make it simple and effective but it turns out it was an illusion is it is an illusion or is it greed

of those who built it because of the good the business is well that the open question for me ten years ago when they promised. reactor for a billion dollars was that illusion or was that deception i think the looting themselves aware they trying to deceive the public public to give them one more chance because it worked the american government and the british government believed those claims that plants could be cheaper and safer and simpler and launched make nuclear programs on that basis so steve thomas professor of energy studies at the university of being spotted like told you that should lead to a great play with us to continue this until you're in it.

this time it's solid for decades. twenty five years ago on the entire fifty thousand calculation only iranian town prepared for the microwave to within three hours. but now it wants to be heard recently some people started receiving posts notices telling them to pick up letters at this post office ingredients. the stories of the world's long gone. that's after the challenge of. meeting the diaries of the ghost of our choosing. wealthy british style size. that's not on such. a. market

finance scandal why not what's really happening to the global economy with mike's cars or for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune in to cause a report on. the. line in russia would be soon which brightened if you knew about someone from funniest impressions. whose friends totty don't come. welcome back to spotlight i remember in oregon just to remind you that we guessed in the studio today is steve thomas professor of religious studies at the interest

of queen. professor in another in another positive effect i try to find positive things that never eating habits have to nobble was that after the chernobyl accident people people said well this will boost poltroon said sources of energy by cheaper cleaner did this happen or people just too joe hydrocarbons. i think you're right people just turn to hydrocarbons i think the interest in renewable energy efficiency came with the recognition that greenhouse gases and global warming was a major problem that's what tipped thing you balance in their favor people never learn. people have short memories they learn but they forget so so so so is there is something is there anything that will prevent people from from forgetting and and force them to learn the lessons of history well people will forget but you hope

that governments won't forget you hope that they will make a change that will last for the future rather than just making public relations statements that. cover over the cracks for the short period until it's out of the headline if people will forget and maybe they should forget and maybe that's good the ability to forget the bad things and the government shouldn't now if we get back to to to the beginning of the century to the truth when people started talking about the release since our nuclear energy it was political took it with the governments and started talking about that so so so the government didn't forget but this thought about it so greed. it's very difficult to understand what the. push when you clear power is you could see it in

terms of industrial interests that big companies would do well out of it the various interest groups but it seems to go deeper than that but even in britain we have no big companies involved in nuclear power the nuclear research the parties have no political influence yet there is still this push this strength of nuclear power and it's very difficult to understand it's it's an emotional thing i think you have to look at psychological factors rather than the simple greed and corruption angle but why isn't britain technologically read those countries why isn't it working and nuclear ingenuity applied to it because you have the north enough coming from france one know what we the british government is working very hard to restart nuclear offering we have a very bad history of nuclear power the last thing we did successfully in nuclear power was probably fifty years ago if you look at the decisions since then pretty

much everyone has been a very bad decision and you know there's no denying that six years ago tony blair decided that the future was nuclear and he told the public nuclear is back with a vengeance those were his words and since then we have been going through the process of trying to restart ordering of nuclear power plants in britain and we're still two or three years away from the position where we can actually start digging holes in the ground and building new nuclear power plants because people are conservative or because people are more pessimistic about they're all cautious or have long memories then then people have the confidence this is not this is not people slowing the process down the process is slow because the process involves convince sing the safety regulator that the designs they want to build are safe enough and that's taking a long time it's take. and five years so far that's not influenced by public

opinion or public that's just safety regulator doing his job as conscientiously as he can after fukushima after the disaster. when we state there nuclear renaissance is over. i think it's well the best it can be is very much delayed because if you're a safety regulator now how can you possibly sign off or design a safe to build when you don't know what's happened at fukushima much less that the designs that you're certifying will never suffer from those same problems and you know just as turner bill couldn't have been written off as. a freak due to this eccentric technology operated in this very strange way fukushima can't be written off as a matter of safe you're in a worth quake zone where you might get a tsunami it was the quake it was the term it was it people see that is that so nobody was a couple of inches smaller there would have gone away with it because it was

a little bit later a meter needed to hurry and it was designed for a nine needed cinnaminson it was ten meters and this is what was critical to salt water salt water just destroyed all the station. again but if we build if we build a nuclear power plant similar to fukushima in a land far is it with tsunamis don't reach it doesn't automatically make it twenty percent c does it yes it is but what safety regulators look at is not the triggering event but what happens afterwards so with turner bill they didn't look at the fact that the operators did stupid things what they looked at was they needed designs that would not go out of control. full proof so there is a lot of talk about passive safety now so that a reactor if everything goes wrong will revert to

a safe state so that you're not requiring the intervention of anything engineer so passive safety was the lesson of journal bill so it wasn't about a soviet design but operated it was about thinking much more carefully about how you could get to that same situation. and how you could. make sure you survive that because you're thinking about very rare events a nuclear reactor has to be designed the standard is that you've got a major accident once in ten million years of operation and you've got to think what events can happen once in ten million years and that requires an immense stretch of the imagination and maybe we're asking too much of nuclear designers to ask to have that sort of imagination if we go ten million years we can we can we can talk a bit about asteroids falling into the station and you could if you could make a station asteroid if it acts through it through food down since it involves salt

water i mean a day ago this still only i think the only mechanisms they can survive being put into salt water are those in the position of the good god being obviously there's a really good look whatever you put in salt water stops working i mean yes yes. it was it was in that plant was finished ok now. are you happy there if you can be happy research things now with the open this coverage official coverage government allows and does have the fukushima accident and of what was being done after. i think that's a bit early to say i think there is history in japan over the last fifteen years there's been three or four significant events there nothing very serious has happened as a result of it but the problem in every case has been the initial cover up of the event and then minimization of what has gone on and then the ritual

resignations and suicides that followed on from that and my my my suspicion is that we will get some of the same happening with focus shima that there was an attempt to calm fears that keep things from the public and. i'm surprised that the japanese have not learnt better than that now they should have learnt the need for openness well i have an impression that being nuclear lobby is still it's pretty pretty strong in all parts including you know it of king so so do you think that scientists like yourself can hold can hold the whole this and could are able to to. even it out with the nuclear lobby to keep things under control but i think that as a public have short attention spans and the nuclear industry is published the

machine will be in full alert now trying to calm fears but the people that we have to look at the regulators the safety regulators the people whose name is signed at the bottom that says this reactor is safe because that's their reputation but i didn't impression that the name at the bottom is the need of the account and these people say no alternative to nuclear energy it will make it will make your your your electricity bills go up and it is a true. i think the biggest that parents are nuclear power is the problem of convincing financier's and credit rating agencies it's interesting when in the last decade the most effective critiques of nuclear power not come from greenpeace or environmental activists it's from companies like standard and poor's from citibank from companies that whose who are not anti nuclear butter and to losing their clients' money and that's what they're concerned about with nuclear power do you think that their fuel costs will go up as

a result of the fukushima incident the fuel cost well the the fuel cost is a very small element of the cost of a kilowatt hour of nuclear electricity it's about five percent of total no two thirds of the cost is the cost of actually building the plant and that's why finance is so important because two thirds of the cost is building it so the rate at which it borrow money is crucial because if it. if it alone guaranteed loan as is trying to take place in america then you can borrow money at the same rate as the american government two or three percent that's very cheap money if that's money that at risk if the company building the plant grows bankrupt and the bank doesn't get repaid. the interest rate is going to be several times five six times that and that will kill the economics and. thank you thank you very much for being with us and just

a reminder that my guest in the studio head today was steve thomas professor of energy studies at the university of maine and that's it for now all of us here if you were yourselves felt like we had someone in while for a little information interview let's go to drop below at party t.v. dad are you and let's leave the spotlight interact would be back with more than two hundred thousand in and outside russia little red tails how to. and let's take thank you. plug. plug plug play.

in india she's available in the goal of the joint chiefs jones.