Never let it be said that I am closed-minded.

I came to West Cumbria from New Zealand – a country that is adamantly nuclear-free.

That means no nuclear power stations, no nuclear-powered vessels in our docks and no nuclear armaments allowed near the country.

I think I might have told you about my job interview with the then editor of the Times & Star, Terry Kirton.

He asked me what I thought of the wind turbines I had passed on the A596.

Until that point in my life, I had never seen wind turbines like those.

I found them quite intimidating and was not totally convinced that they were not following me as I drove along the coast.

“I suppose they are better than nuclear power,” I blurted out.

He then pointed out that we were on the doorstep of Britain’s largest nuclear power station at Sellafield!

I arrived here in April 2002, less than a year after 9/11.

The one thing that nobody had told me was that RAF planes did exercises in this area.

For a long time, when I would hear planes screaming overhead, I was convinced they were terrorist planes heading for Sellafield and we were all going to die.

I certainly was not comforted when I did a story from a press release a few months after starting work.

It stated that iodine tablets would no longer be issued to schools and houses within a certain radius of the nuclear plant.

Why were they being given the pills anyway?

The word “placebo” shone in my mind like a flashing neon sign. Give them something to do, some kind of hope and by the time they get the pills it will be all over anyway!

It is amazing how you get used to things.

Now, to me, Sellafield is a place that employs hundreds of people. If it was not for Sellafield, a lot of our West Cumbrian towns would barely survive.

Then came last week’s BBC Panorama programme.

Funnily enough, the scaremongering failed to impress.

I am still sure, in my mind, that the people telling us that issues of safety are being dealt with would not be working there if they thought that was untrue.

It would be like a pilot agreeing to take off in a plane he knew was unsafe.

So, unless the plant is being run by a bunch of suicidal maniacs, I am sure they are doing everything they can to keep themselves safe and, by default, the rest of us too.

BUT ... what did scare the heck out of me was the sheer enormity of what nuclear power means and, most importantly, the impossible task of getting rid of waste.

This Government has introduced legislation which makes us pay for plastic bags in shops.

At the same time it is building, and has built, nuclear power stations and armed us with nuclear weapons and are now facing the horrendous task of what to do with the waste.

There is absolutely nothing we can do with the nuclear power stations that are already here and I guess not having one in West Cumbria would be the absolute equivalent of closing the coal mines and pulling the pin on the steel industry.

We would see a recession of the worst kind in an area that has been so cruelly hit in the past.

At a time when even decommissioning and the storage of nuclear waste is creating jobs, not just at Sellafield but all along the energy coast, it’s perhaps an evil we have to live with.

Panorama has shown me, however, that New Zealand is right. And, if we could start all over, maybe there would be another way to provide jobs that would not create this unimagineable environmental problem for generations to come.

Maybe the turbines aren’t so bad after all.

And as for my plastic bags? Well, they only take 20 years to disintegrate!