Our family arrived in Albury in 1975, and were to experience two consecutive '100-year floods' and violent hailstorms that caused much damage.

There is a hypothesis that weather runs in an approximately 50-year cycle and the current heavy rain, etc. may be just that.

Let's not ruin the economy and our quality of life by adopting a Chicken Little approach to every shift in the weather. Plan appropriately but get the infrastructure in place wisely and carefully.

IN OTHER NEWS:

Well done Neil Drew, for your letter in last Saturday's Border Mail. Some common sense, at last.

The Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Mr Bowen, recently dismissed, out of hand, a suggestion that Australia should be looking at modular nuclear power stations. These should be available fairly soon, from Rolls Royce and others, and will be capable of providing electricity 24/7.

Mr Bowen said that nuclear power was four times as expensive as solar, and therefore was not worth considering.

Given that a nuclear power station would work 24 hours per day, versus a solar array only 12 hours (very generously), that would appear to make nuclear only twice as expensive as solar (using Mr Bowen's figures).

So, for solar, for a unit of electricity costing a dollar, our nuclear station, producing the same unit of electricity, would be costing us $2.

But, according to Rolls Royce figures, their modular units will arrive in pieces, be assembled on site, and be fuelled for life - that is, 60 years of fuel.

On the other hand, the life of solar panels is not clear, but let's say it is 20 years. So, while our nuclear plant is chugging away for 60 years and costing us the $2 per unit of power, the solar panels would need to be replaced three times over that period. So our dollar's worth of power from solar now costs us $3.

By my reckoning nuclear power would actually be cheaper!!!

Add to that, vast arrays of solar panels need lots of space (farmland??), and that space is found out west, while the users of the electricity are in the cities. So billions will have to be spent getting the "cheap" solar power to where the users are.

Our nuclear unit, however, can be trucked in, assembled and sited on the spot where the old coal-fired power station sat, and connected to the existing power lines - job done.

Comments please. If Neil and I are completely wrong, would someone write in and put us straight.

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