The Editor, Sir:

I am overjoyed at this new interest in nuclear energy created in your recent publication. Power has always been the nemesis of local business. Its supply is either too expensive, unreliable, inadequate or combinations of all three. Those who have been blessed with natural gas and oil have been able to subsidise their electrical production so as to woo and win manufacturers from our shores. And we speak of manufacturers that we had traditionally taken for granted and who had grown to be household names - big names who maintain offices here, but manufacture elsewhere - just because of the problems with electrical power. Today, even bottled water can be imported cheaper than we are able to produce it in this 'land of wood and water'. Those mindful to dispute this fact should just check the supermarket shelves.

Your archives will bear witness that nuclear power used to be discussed as an option but the economic size of the plants then, made them too large for us. However, the debate stopped abruptly after Three Mile Island, United States. For nuclear power to reclaim its position as a viable option in Jamaica, there are other factors of significant importance. We need to examine the merits and de-merits of nuclear power technology, especially now a quarter century on, with the advancement of the technology from the behemoths of old to these football field-sized plants, and then we need to garner and rebuild public confidence in nuclear technology.

Also, in considering this advanced nuclear technology (PBMR), we must be mindful that the majority of the opposition to nuclear energy will remain either oblivious of the facts or opposed to it regardless of the truth, and hence please, a strategy to deal with this front.

So we need:

(i) Frank articles on the progress of the technology since 1986 when, albeit a first generation PBMR had an accident in Hamm-Uentrop, West Germany. Nuclear science and scientists seem unable to live down Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Hamm-Uentrop.

(ii) Where is the prototype that was to begin in 2002, and what is the evaluation of this prototype today? Where else are they being used, and what are the significant improvements of all successive generations of PBMR since Germany?

(iii) What are the environmental and economic costs and benefits for small economies like Jamaica? Can we reverse the declining trend of manufacturing andcommerce in Jamaica using nuclear power? We need to build our case.

So the proposers of nuclear energy must build a strategy as well, not just to advance construction and commission, but to protect the total work from the resistance (Jamaicans and the international community as well are very resourceful), being always mindful that even after the laborious stages of negotiations for contract and finance etc., we still have to wade through acres of 'green tape' and environmentalists.

I am, etc.,

STEAD M. WILLAMS

sweng@cwjamaica.com

P.O. Box 242

Via Go-Jamaica