SIR — Further to the letter from Cllr Chris Morgan (Free Press May 3), I fear he is right to point out that West Somerset suffers whether Hinkley C proceeds or not.

While I understand his concern over the current impasse, it's as well to realise that any decision to proceed will be made in Paris and as such, pressure from any Somerset MP or councillor is, sadly, futile.

EdF have run into serious problems in delivery of similar projects in Finland and France, being in part responsible for their current debt of some 40 billion Euros.

This with their other commitment to spend billions more upgrading their French reactors all adds weight to the view that maybe Hinkley C will not happen.

We should at least be planning for this eventuality, and looking for opportunity this might present.

One of many problems with EdF's third-generation EPR reactor design is the toxic radioactive waste that will be created and left to blight future generations for millions of years.

If nuclear power has to be a part of our energy future, we could look instead at a fourth generation reactor design, one which could consume existing stockpiles of nuclear waste as fuel and transform it into smaller piles of waste which would remain dangerously radioactive for a few centuries rather than millennia.

One myth to nail - "All the lights will go out". At present we have generating capacity to meet almost any level of demand.

This is a legacy from the good old days when energy was supplied by public service utilities – this was "supply side management".

Due to failure of all recent governments to implement any coherent energy policy, supply capacity will contract over the next few years.

This means there will be times when not all demand can be met – the future is for "demand side management". So what should we do?

Having power supplied from a small number of large power stations is the way it's always been done.

One problem with this is that two thirds of the energy gets wasted as heat at the power stations. This massive inefficiency could be addressed by turning the industry up the other way and building a large number of small stations where the heat can be used locally instead of wasted.

This should become part of any long term solution.

In the shorter term we must find ways to reduce demand at peak times, and two methods are through use of "smart meters" and "smart appliances".

Smart meters are on the way - government diktat insists we will all have them by 2020. They work by giving energy suppliers the power to charge different prices at different times.

At its most brutal, this could price the poorest in society out of the energy market altogether in times of greatest need.

Smart appliances work by monitoring the power network and switching off during high load periods and on when load reduces. This works well for appliances such as fridges and heaters.

A few pence worth of electronics fitted to new appliances would help keep the lights on for us all. Replacing our old appliances with smart appliances over the next decade would help build some much needed resilience into the electricity supply system and could save us the need for a Hinkley or two.

Cllr Jon Freeman,

West Somerset Council.