Bernard Ingham: A is for atomic in the alphabet of modern life

My fervent hope is that nature’s awakening will bring a greater sense of reality about fiscal and environmental matters. I am, however, prepared to be disappointed since the TUC is hell-bent on trouble, starting with this weekend’s demonstration over spending cuts, regardless of debt, and the parade of blind anti-nuclear prejudice arising from Japan’s movingly stoic response to monumental disaster.

We desperately need to acquire a sense of proportion about our own problems after the combined earthquake and tsunami devastation wrought on Japan.

They don’t add up to much compared with those of the missing Japanese pensioner or orphaned child, freezing into the grave without food, water or shelter.

It is these unknown victims that should teach us the ABC of modern living. All of them, so far as we know, have died from the force of nature, which, while bountiful, is also red in tooth and claw and violence.

In various ways we are all at risk to some degree. We cannot eliminate that risk, though we can reduce it. The Japanese thought they had controlled both earthquake and tsunami risk – and then came one of the worst subterranean spasms the world has known with its subsequent elemental sea surge.

It was the last thing they needed with a stagnant economy saddled with mountainous debts.

While still rich, Japan has been debilitated for a long time and now faces the enormous task and expense of disaster recovery, not to mention debt repayment.

To restore the nation and at the same time act on the painful lessons learned over the past 12 days, it needs to be functioning on all undamaged cylinders. It cannot redeem debt and rebuild without energy and more especially electricity.

Modern economies need reliable, continuous power. Without it, they not merely cease to function; society breaks down, especially in less disciplined countries than Japan. Law and order now depends as much on electricity as industry and commerce.

Japan has next to no natural fuel. That is why it is seeking to protect itself from the uncertainties of reliance on fossil fuel by generating half of its electricity by nuclear means. The traumas at the stricken 40-year-old Fukushima plants have in no way invalidated that policy.

In the 1970s they built solidly in an earthquake zone but they underestimated the potential height of a following tsunami, which removed the very power they required to cool reactors that shut down as planned during the tremors. Even then they have heroically managed to bring things under control and contain the spread of dangerous levels of radiation.

If the Japanese, with all their engineering skills, could run their country on wind, waves, tides, solar and other forms of so-called renewable power, they would have done so by now. They know they can’t – and, leave aside carbon dioxide emissions, they know they cannot afford to expose themselves unduly to world coal, oil and gas prices.

In short, they need nuclear power to remain a successful nation, to drive the creation of wealth to repair their northern prefectures and to do their bit to contain carbon emissions. As our Ministers constantly remind us, environmentalism does not come cheap.

All this should count for something in Britain since we do not sit on a tsunami-inducing fault in the earth’s crust, have been generating nuclear power for 55 years without suffering a single death from a radiation accident and are proposing to build a new generation of safer, cleaner and more economic reactors on established nuclear sites.

It won’t, of course, mean a thing to the anti-nukes who peddle economy-wrecking fantasies such as wind power and unproven carbon sequestration. But it should count with sensible people who might ask Greens why they do not call for an end to medical treatments that annually put 140 times more radioactivity into the atmosphere than nuclear power and all its works.

Our Government has so far behaved very sensibly in pausing to take on board the lessons to be learned from Japan.

But if Chancellor George Osborne continues to indulge the renewables industries in today’s budget, you will know that debt-ridden Britain still has some way to go before it learns from Japan the ABC of modern living – without continuous electricity you have no economy; you can then forget about combating global warming.