 IN a nice turn-up on the Biblical adage, it seems the rich bankers are always with us. The new chief executive of Lloyds Banking Group, antonio Horta-Osorio gets a GBP9.7 million pay package, while his predecessor, Eric Daniels, graciously accepts his leaving bonus of GBP1.45m. and the top-paid guy at Lloyds - we are not given his name, but we assume it is a "he" - gets close to GBP5m.  Is there nothing that can be done to bring sky-high bank remuneration closer to the ground? apparently not. Jens Hagendorff, senior lecturer in banking and finance at the University of Edinburgh Business School, says that the issue is complicated. "There is a widespread belief in banking that individuals make a big difference and will increase performance," he observes.  He argues this comes from the history of banking, where the profits of once privately-owned banks, particularly the old Goldman Sachs-style investment banks, went to the proprietors.  Unless the UK or Europe wants to see its bank employees go elsewhere, global salaries must be comparable. and anyway, caps on salary don't work because there is plenty of evidence that remuneration committees come up with even more ingenious ways of rewarding their top staff, through options and the like.  In the end, it is the fault of the shareholders, argues Hagendorff, who don't want to risk losing the bankers they pay so handsomely and vote to let them pay as they do.  Lloyds' own remuneration report insists it uses other UK banks, as well as comparable FTSE 250 companies, to make sure its pay is not out of whack. In this, it turns out that Lloyds' pay remains well below that of many rival banks. Barclays' new boss, Bob Diamond, and two other top directors were paid a collective GBP28m last year. But whether this drives one to tears for the poor fate faced by Horta-Osorio and Daniels is, let's face it, unlikely.  aS RaDIaTION from the Fukushima meltdown starts raining gently down on our shoulders, the Scottish Chambers of Commerce (SCC) has backed the nuclear option in it its Holyrood election policy document.  The Scottish Government is strictly no-nukes and with hysteria mounting over the spectre of radioactive particles in the water, surely the chamber's argument that it's time to build new reactors in Scotland is misguided?  The SCC says that although it's keen on renewables, it provides a fretful list of things that need to be addressed before green energy can be made a dead certainty. These are mainly to do with the need to expand and upgrade the grid - not just in Scotland, either - and the uncertainty of costs around the development of wind farms, on and offshore, let alone questions of the viability of using tidal energy, which we have only just begun to capture.  Before Fukushima, a very strange thing was happening to the image of nukes. For a 