How those people opposed to nuclear power must have squirmed with embarrassment when they read David Williams’s piece in the Oxford Mail ( Issue, March 24).

Picking-up on the points he made, may I make the following points in response: * The unit cost for electric power is virtually the same for gas, coal and nuclear – the cost for wind power is greater by a factor of three. * We do know how to deal with radioactive waste. We can treat it and remove the troublesome radionuclides and store them and then use the plutonium as fuel, or we can store the unprocessed waste.

* The official WHO figure for deaths from Chernobyl is less than 50 – and most of those were firefighters exposed to high temperatures rather than to radiation.

Mr Williams said “it is thought to have killed more than 985,000 in the Ukraine, Russia and Belarus.”

* Solar and windpower are not sustainable low carbon solutions to our problems. Where shall we get power when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow?

* Since the present government has been in power for less than a year, how can they be accused of ignoring the advice of scientists for the past 25 years?

* He is wrong to say “billions upon billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money will be wasted on building new nuclear power plants.”

* The last government made it clear that there would be no government subsidy for new nuclear power stations. The present government has not yet decided on this issue but at present it looks unlikely that nuclear will be subsidised.

* Mr Williams is wrong to say “the history of nuclear power is littered with fatal accidents.”

In all its years of operation, there was not a serious accident at Calder Hall.

The accident at Windscale (now Sellafield) in 1957 resulted in no deaths, and the main outcome of the Three Mile Island accident was that the emergency procedures operated very well and nobody was seriously injured.

As Sir Bernard Ingham pointed out, in the 55 years of generating power by nuclear means in Britain, there has not been a single death due to radiation. DR JOHN SANDALLS, Locks Lane, Wantage