SO this week we've dipped swiftly into the national coffers and come up with a mere £140million to keep British Energy afloat.

It never ceases to amaze me what this country manages to find money for at the drop of a hat.

We can't afford to keep a few old people's homes open but we can lavish millions on white elephants like The Dome, and multiple classy centres for asylum seekers, to name but two.

And what are we propping up this time? A failed energy company, already so deep in debt that it's had to be kept going to the end of the month, creating a product on which it cannot make money by operating the most dangerous means that man has ever devised.

The government insists that the £410million is only a loan, given in order to maintain electricity supplies and to ensure safety is maintained. To me the loan is a joke -- like lending ten quid to a bankrupt. The maintenance of supplies? British Energy creates only 25 per cent of our national electricity and demand levels currently mean that we don't actually need it. Other cheaper producing conventional plants could easily step up output to cover.

So I think that leaves the safety issue. I think our energy chiefs are scared stiff of what might happen if a failed company in charge of a highly dangerous chain of nuclear plants all around the country suddenly collapses.

And one major world event has shown us all what can happen if things go wrong. That was Chernobyl, where even now, all these years later, people are dying, malformed births are happening, children are suffering all the horrendous nuclear illnesses, and even our own flocks and fields were contaminated by this distant disaster.

The present crisis presents the government with a golden opportunity to phase out these nuclear plants which few people wanted in the first place. Even if we maintain them well and they pose no threat from mismanagement, we have heard only in the last few days that terrorist networks have planned the unthinkable -- making them targets. I think this alone is a good enough case for decommissioning.

The government, which created these nuclear hot spots, claims they produce "clean" energy and reduce the need to operate greenhouse gas producing conventional plants. It is suggested that British Energy could be made more viable by removing the costly environmental levy (which surely would be self-defeating) or releasing it from a crippling contract for Sellafield to process its lethal toxic waste (which financially struggling Sellafield will not do).

It's an interesting trap we have been steered into. We have a nuclear power industry which has gone bust helping to keep going an horrendous nuclear establishment on the fringe of our beautiful Lake District making money by processing the world's Domesday effluent.

In my view they should all be allowed to fall like dominoes -- but by a careful management shutdown. More wind and wave technology should be used to produce REALLY clean energy instead of these nuclear horror plants.