From the safety of a computer screen in the control room, I can see a robot scoop up a chunk of asbestos from the reactor floor. I am at Sellafield, the nuclear complex on the coast of Cumbria in north-west England, watching remotely controlled machinery crawl through the defunct Windscale Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactor, gradually stripping out the last of its guts. The mammoth task of dismantling the reactor started in the early 1990s but is only now finally nearing completion.

Nuclear power is expensive and unsafe, nuclear weapons are barbarous. We don t need them

India s pampered nuclear power programme is losing steam. Uranium stocks are almost over; people won t let the government dig new mines; all projects are running late and new technology is almost impossible to get as decommissioning reactors is the trend

unearthed: Thought to be extinct, the lizard Barkudia insularis has been sighted in Orissa's Chilika lagoon after more than 85 years. Ajit Kumar Patnaik, chief executive officer of the Chilika

No stock, nuclear energy programme in crisis