hi-tech that

timeout magazine, 07.99

We're on the bridge of the Star Trek Enterprise, standing at the spot normally occupied by Kirk's swivel chair. In front of us, on the viewing screen, we can see earth slowly revolving in space. Spock and Scotty hover to one side, holding an animated discussion that explains our predicament - in a parallel universe version of the plot of Star Trek IV (the one with the whales) we have been hurled back in time to the twentieth century, and our XX crystals [can't remember the names of these] have been screwed in the process. Our mission is to find a fuel source capable of powering the ship back to its own time. 'But these people are so primitive they still burn fossil fuels,' moans Scotty. 'It's hard to believe they are our ancestors.' 'I think you'll find that that's truer of you than of me,' Spock answers patronisingly. 'And anyway, they did have nuclear power.'

Nuclear power! Suddenly we're back down to earth with a bang (or rather, with a criticality). Because we're not on the bridge world's most famous sci-fi spacecraft at all, but in the Visitors' Centre at the Sizewell nuclear facility - which isn't 36,500 miles above the planet in a geostationary orbit but on the Suffolk coastline near Leiston, a few miles north of the super-twee tourist village of Aldeburgh. Not everyone's idea of a fun day out I know, but being a hardened materialist I've managed to convince my friends (the two I've got left) to spend Easter Saturday poking around, not in a Christian cathedral, but in a secular one.

This is not the place to explore the pros and cons of nuclear power, but if you're at all interested in the subject, Sizewell's as good a place as any to start. Tours are free and prebookable, and you can take in either of the two powerstations or both. Sizewell B (a pressurised water reactor that went online in 1995) is the more modern of the two, and with its blue walls and white dome - designed to disappear from view with the sightest sea mist - the more impressive from the outside, while Sizewell A (a gas cooled Magnox reactor that's been running since 1966) is much more fun from within, mainly because it's full of cool 1960s 'Thunderbirds' style technology. Donning a hardhat complete with ear-muffs to combat the incredible noise you enter via the turbine hall and wander the catwalks between huge labyrinths of pipes, pausing at banks of crimson steam valves and bright yellow panels sprouting adjustment wheels. After that you pass through the standup alpha detectors and the signs warning against negligence (a sign showing a man lying dead on the ground screams 'This is where a laid back attitude to safety gets you!') and the wearing of stilettos, and move on into the control room, where the low lighting and dark green and chrome consoles are straight out of a postwar science-fiction comic.

This was the futurist dream of nuclear power 1960s-style. But at Sizewell you get it 90s-style too, in the form of extreme corporate spin. While the ridiculous Enterprise mockup shamelessly exploits people's sense of wonder, the Visitors' Centre also sells rulers and pencils and other mementos decorated with insects and grasses and birds as if Sizewell wasn't a powerstation at all but a national park. Free pamphlets assured you that the spent fuel ponds have 'sufficient storage for the life of the facility,' but don't mention the terrible difficulties posed by the problem of storing spent fuel for the millennia needed for the dangerous isotopes in it to decay. Still, it's not all lies - the Centre is genuinely educative about nuclear fission, radioactivity and the need to find alternate energy sources if we're to avoid global warming.

My feelings about it all were pretty well summed in a poem pinned to one of the display boards showing projects by the recently indoctrinated children of visiting schools. It's by one Stacey B. (I hope she doesn't mind my quoting her in full):

On Thursday I went to Sizewell A
I saw the atoms going up to Saturn
I wanted to play
It was so smelly
I had to take my wellies.
I think the neutrons are so fat
They have eaten my cat.
There was this lightning thing
It was so frightning
And that's the end of today.