Nuclear power – still no thanks!
This is an article written for the London 21 newsletter (www.london21.org) - comments welcome

It’s 28 years since several thousand people took part in the UK’s largest ever direct action when they climber over or cut through the fence at the site of what was to be the Torness nuclear power station in southern Scotland. That station was built, and the one after that at Sizewell. But that was it for nuclear power. The collapse of Thatcher’s proposed programme of ten new nukes was not just down to the 100,000+ people who went on the UK’s largest ever environmental demonstration on the 1st anniversary of Chernobyl in 1987. It was stopped in its tracks a year later when the exorbitant economic costs were finally made transparent when the electricity industry was set for privatisation.

Now it’s back. With a new angle. The industry used to claim that without nuclear power we’d ‘freeze in the dark’. Now they say it’s needed to stop us cooking in the global oven.

Should anyone be thinking that this makes some kind of sense it might be worth reviewing why we didn’t like it first time. The three key reasons were:

UNSAFE. The risks of a catastrophe may be small, but it’s a very foolish engineer who will tell you that any worst case is ‘impossible’. The risks remain, as do the rather more problematic and immediate risks arising from the UK’s legacy of nuclear waste. High, medium and low-level wastes all pose serious problems for our environment and our health and there is still no effective method of ensuring the long-term security of high-level waste (2.5 Million years is the length of time needed to allow for full radioactive decay of key pollutants) in operation anywhere in the world.

UNECONOMIC. Surprise, surprise: nuclear power has not got cheaper since the 1980s (compare and contrast with wind and photovoltaics). The nuclear station being built in Finland and promoted two years ago as the ‘first of the new generation’ is now way behind schedule and over budget. The government has said that industry will pay the costs of building the new stations, but it’s very clear that the industry will expect subsidies or guaranteed prices. Meanwhile the costs of clearing up the nuclear industry’s legacy to date has hot £73Buillion of our money.

UNNECESSARY. Nuclear power is only a source of electricity – it’s not an oil substitute. We have shot past early targets set for wind power in the UK (the same targets derided as ‘impossible and unrealistic’ by the nuclear industry) but we have still only scratched the surface of the potential for renewables world-wide. Photovoltaics and solar thermal are still hugely under-used, but more significantly our homes and offices still waste far more energy than that generated by nuclear power. More worryingly, there is always only so much capital to invest: if it all gets tied up in nuclear power, the likelihood is that new sources of energy will be starved of investment.

We could go on to talk about the problems of uranium mining and enrichment, and more significantly of creating more material for nuclear weapons (governmental or otherwise), but there’s one final problem.

We have to cut CO2 emissions by 80% or more. To do that we need to make major changes to our consumption patterns (rather more than just giving up plastic bags…) The centralised ‘solution’ of nuclear power sends a very damaging message to consumers: that the industry can generate all the electricity you need and that you can carry on consuming (and wasting) as before. Nuclear power is all too likely to encourage us to carry on in a truly unsustainable direction – and take us further over the edge.