IT has been some time since we heard anything from our French neighbours in relation to their nuclear installations in Normandy.

But earlier this week a report about ‘leaked’ documents claimed that the under-construction third Flamanville reactor has weaknesses that could result in a Chernobyl-type catastrophe.

Ironically, for a number of years now this Island has hosted children who have suffered physically following the 1986 nuclear disaster in what is now Ukraine. Those children and many others like them still bear the scars of the damage that nuclear activity can cause to human lives. Their families, too, still bear those scars – and are likely to do so for many generations to come.

Supporters of nuclear energy will tell you that Chernobyl is unlikely ever to occur again because of technological advances. They will even provide statistical probability as evidence. But the ongoing blight of that 1980s disaster will be enough to convince some of us, at least, that nuclear power is not as harmless as its supporters would like us to believe.

On balance, nuclear power is, of course, less of an obvious pollutant than coal-fired energy. It’s also a good deal cheaper, at the current time, in terms of volume, than other options such as wave power.

So for a world greedy for energy and bound – at least in the West – by directives on carbon footprints and the like, nuclear energy is the medium term future. That is why France, in particular, has embraced it so enthusiastically, with a nuclear power station popping up out of the landscape every few miles, or so it seems to the passing traveller. And now the UK government, too, is putting its investment in the same technology.

For us in the Channel Islands, the potential problems are weighty. For one thing, at the present time we depend on the French power grid to fuel our own thirst for electricity – and most of that power will be generated from nuclear sources.

There is now a plan to explore the possibilities of wave power around our shores. In the longer term, and as the price of this technology falls, it is an option to be considered seriously.
But there is also a price to pay on the sea bed, where the life forms that currently exist may not withstand the changes we want to impose on the environment.

In the meantime, Flamanville’s near neighbour, the nuclear reprocessing plant at Cap de la Hague, can still be seen on our horizon, on a clear day. For some of us, it will continue to be a reminder of the global impact of human domination – and a warning of the potential for our own destruction.

• Read more from Christine Herbert in Saturday’s JEP