for the fall so we've got. the biggest issues get a human voice face to face with the news makers on our team. with r.t. and live from moscow today from london our top stories it is a day of remembrance for the victims of the china disaster exactly a quarter of a century on and the safety of nuclear energy sparks concern once again after the recent crisis of japan's fukushima colony. italy is the latest to joined nato bomb plot went to colonel gadhafi forces in libya and a month into the operation experts are speculating whether it was a planned a long time ago including the action of arming the rebels before any un dressed

began. pressure wiki leaks revelations depicting britain as a terrorism breeding with bombers trained in london mosques and mosque the minds of finding safe haven in the country. next with a shut eye wall of china mobile shopping in focus on japan some nuclear crisis a present danger spotlight asks whether now is the time to consider a world without atomic energy you stick with us. we'll. bring you the latest in science technology from the realm. of the future.

hello again oh welcome to spotlight. today my guest in this studio is steve thomas thirty five years ago the explosion at the true novel new 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 acres of land laid waste. away in the world's thought it left the tragedy far behind by a dreadful tsunami hit tomic nuclear plant in japan and then here we are again trying to make an enforceable choice between a new clear and a non-nuclear world or maybe it is possible here's professor manager studies at the university of greenwich stephen thomas. in the twentieth century energy has become a key to successful economic development but cheaper energy required immense natural

resources like rivers of fossil fuels that's where nuclear energy came to rescue cheap and during an ecologically clean it seemed to be a bridge for all decision but the explosion a meltdown of the chair noble nuclear power plant and sauvage a great many enthusiasts in the world but still it could stop mankind in its pursuit of the. many nuclear power plants have been built and are being built now and even the latest nuclear accident in japan could reverse the flow. first 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 new ads for a specialist for scientists did this scientists warn 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 going up and so so you did where you needed were in the public you didn't win the governments there are things laid there are possible i think that people realized melt down for possible i don't think they realized the fundamental flaws with that particular design a reactor that could go out of control and that way well the initial reaction of the soviet government was to cover the instant you remember that even in here where the radiation was very high it was announced only after the after the may. never have made it like on the second and third of may in people went to swim in the

river and go out and their families and so on what was the reaction in the west different for example did the reaction of the u.k. government did they did they start immediately alert or or they also did wanted to do to cause panic well 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 our designs were much superior and couldn't possibly do that sort of thing. and well. and the shock after the chernobyl nuclear power plant accident it took nuclear power off. and the

agenda in many countries is there true i'm not sure that is true i think again if you go back to three mile island the big previous accident people hate 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 wrong for nuclear power to say it's all down to chernobyl it and there's not problems with the technology itself let's blame it on churn and the same will happen with her because she male so so so you so it's 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 on line if we 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 built 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 fukushima 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 so so the theory there these were the ordinary people the prior to the citizens protests grouse fruits diplomacy. and 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 the world is governed where money. was i have no problem with people going on the streets and protesting but people's attention span is very short focus shiina won't be news in two three months time. but instead it will be ten years before the regulations require cancer well you. know yes but it'll be off the front pray just 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 me player power now nobody wants to lend money because it's economically risky well let's take their a closer look at the true novel disaster in reported by spotlight humanity media.

only of these people appearing in a soviet news reel do not yet know that soon they'll have to leave their homes for good escaping from a terrible disaster the town of prepared built in one thousand seventy was only expected to grow wind larouche of the three here was exceptionally high for the soviet union they were each population by young employees of the chernobyl power plant twenty five years ago the town was not possible now it's a good part of the so called zone overly anation and the sound was what was described as the worst nuclear catastrophe in world history the disaster came as a result of a human error during the system's task on the plant a series of explosions were to highly radioactive smoke fall out into the atmosphere poisonous cloud from the plant eventually spread over large parts of europe. evacuation from prepaid did not happen immediately assume really three days

in the show we tried to cover up the catastrophe people in the soviet union were only informed of the disaster three days after it happened it's believed 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 programs there are still debates as to how many people had their houses damaged as a result of the chilling noble disaster the biz vary from thousands to hundreds of thousands of catastrophe raised concerns about the safety of the nuclear power industry and many countries the years after the chair 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 the rise the safety requirements have you that is

a true. do they have this positive thing to very difficult question to answer because the problem is that you solved 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. bill so they do raise a safety but. maybe they won't stop the next attack said now we hear the way it will go back to your previous point the more safety you put into your plant. there were powerful gifts the higher the cost and here again we come to a situation where nobody would like to invest in it because this dispenser is there true this is not what the nuclear industry term said ten years ago when it talked about the renascence if you look at the u.s. department of energy 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've 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 but at a lower cost because it was simpler and in a sort of hand-waving way that made sense but the reality is that when they come to cost 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 learned in mind you could make it simple and effective but it turns out it was an illusion is it is that it will lose you know or is it greed of those who built years of the goods business is well that's the

open question for me ten years ago when they promised. reactor for a billion dollars was that delusion or was that deception they deluding themselves and were they trying to deceive the public public to give them one more chance because it worked in american government and the british government believed those claims that plants could be cheaper and safer and simpler and launch big nuclear programs on that basis so steve thomas a professor of biology studies at the university of the spotlight will be back shortly after the break self stay with us we'll continue this interview in a minute.

silence for decades. twenty five years ago on the entire fifty thousand population all week radio down pretty hard for them i can't wait to within three hours. but now it wants to be heard recently some people started receiving posts notices telling them to beat up letters at this post office ingredients. the stories of the world long gone. that's after the challenge of. meeting the diaries of ghosts are checked. wealthy british style. guide to the title.

market finance come to. find out what's really happening to the global economy with much stronger for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune in to cause a report on r.g.p. . for. the russian would be soon which brightened if you knew about someone from financed impression is so. nice for instance on t.v. don't come. yet. welcome back to spotlight on our going logon just through why is it my guest

in the studio today is steve thomas professor of religious studies at the interest between which the first step in a very positive effect i try to find positive things in everything that happens after novel was that after the chernobyl accident people people said well this will boost our truants if sources of energy i keep are cleaner this admin or people just so. i think you're right the people to turn to hydrocarbons i think the interest in renewables and energy efficiency came with the recognition that greenhouse gases and global warming was a major problem that's what tipped the balance in their favor people never learn people have short memories they learn but they forget so so so so is this something is there anything that will prevent people from from from forgetting at the end and

force them to learn the lessons of history or 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 headlines if people will forget it maybe they should forget it maybe that's good the ability to forget the bad things and the government shouldn't now if we give 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 to it where the government started talking about that so so so the government didn't forget. about it so greed. it's very difficult to understand what the. push the nuclear power is you could see it in terms of industrial interests that

big companies would do well out of it at various interest groups but it seems to go deeper than that that 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 revolved culturally why isn't it would king and you clear the gene you get closer to because you have an earth in earth coming from france won't know what we we are the british government is working very hard to restart nuclear ordering 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 they know that 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 going to vote because people will pursue mystical or cautious i have long memories then there are people on the continent 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. in 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. can we state this nuclear renaissance is over i think it's 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 juta this eccentric technology operated in this very strange way for consumer can't be written off as a matter of if you're in a worth quake zone where you might get a tsunami it was the quake it was a tsunami was it you people see it it is that only was

a couple of inches smaller and there would have been away with it because it was a little bit later metre needed to hurry and it was designed for a nine needed tsunami incident was ten metres in and this is what was critical salt water salt water did this drawing all the ground station and those were again so good but if we build if we build a nuclear power plant similar to fukushima in land four is where tsunamis don't reach it doesn't automatically make a hundred percent c there's a. what safety regulators look at is not the triggering event but what happens afterwards so with china build 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 intervention of anything engineered so passive safety was the lesson of journal build so it wasn't about a soviet design but only operated it was about thinking much more carefully about how you could get to that same situation and how you could. make sure you survived that because you're thinking about very rare events a nuclear reactor has to be designed the standard is that you get a major accident once in ten million years of operation now 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 talk about ten million years we can we can we can talk about it asteroids falling into the station and you could you could make a station asteroid. asteroid proof stance and end both salt water i mean this

only i think the only mechanisms that can survive being put into solid water are those in the possession of good plant i mean while the others are really whatever you put in salt water stops working i mean yes. it was it was in that plant was finished ok now though you are happy there if you can be happy with such things with the openness with the coverage official coverage government allows and those are the fukushima accident and what was being done after. i think it'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. but the problem in every case has been the initial cover up of the event 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 learned better than that now they should have learned the need for openness well i am an impression that the nuclear lobby is so that's pretty pretty strong in your party including you know it is king and so so do you think that scientists like yourself can hold can hold the glow hold this and could are able to to. even it out with the nuclear largely due to keep things under control and i think that has a said the 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 name 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 in it it is a true. i think the biggest barrier to nuclear power is the problem of convincing financier's and credit rating agencies it's interesting that in the last decade the most effective critiques of nuclear power not come from greenpeace or environmental activists it's from companies like stand of them paws from citibank from companies that whose who are not and see nuclear but are anti losing their clients' money and that's what they're concerned about with nuclear do you think that the fuel costs

will go up as a result of the fukushima said the fuel costs here of the fuel cost is a very small element of the cost of a kilowatt hour of nuclear electricity it's about five percent of those you know 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 you borrow money is crucial because if it. if it's a loan 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's a risk if the company building the plant goes bankrupt and the bank doesn't get repaid. the interest rate is going to be several times that 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's teles adam university of st and that's if and our help all of us here if you have your skills floodlight we have somebody in while removing racial incidents to drop below coloring of half party are you in let's keep spotlight interact would be back with more than two hundred five minutes going in and outside russia for the lead. and they kept thinking to target. the legislative.

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