Chernobyl was, is and will remain a disaster. We need to...

Chernobyl was, is and will remain a disaster. We need to remember costly lessons from both Chernobyl and Fukushima.

Nuclear reactors are difficult to design, expensive to build and complex to operate. However when the design is right, the build is uncompromising and the operating fastidious, they can produce an abundance of effectively zero carbon electricity for many decades.

Unloading spent fuel from a reactor is one of the many fastidious operations routinely performed at reactors worldwide. The machinery to do the work must be built to the same uncompromising standards as all the essential systems of a reactor. At Fukushima, this machinery is inoperable and likely to remain so. The fuel assemblies stored in the facility there are "hot" is the sense of being highly radioactive and will become literally hot unless cooled by continuously circulating water. They cannot be moved until new storage facilities are available and new machinery to move them has been built and tested. Complicating the issue are high levels of radioactivity surrounding the pool, storage racks that have deformed, bits of crane and gantry lodged in the pool and the location of cooling pool itself, perched 30metres above the ground.