Gordon Brown’s nuclear fantasyland
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UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown demonstrated the strength of his green credentials late last week when he took a helicopter to the Sellafield nuclear plant in the north of the country. Because nothing shows you care for the environment more than flying to one of the most radioactive places on the planet, don’t you find?
Brown’s visit was the latest PR stunt in his government’s campaign to kick-start the UK’s nuclear ‘renaissance’. Giving his seal of approval to the building of a new nuclear reactor on the Sellafield site, the Prime Minister showed his blind ignorance to the facts on the ground.
‘Nuclear is crucial to our low carbon future – it is crucial to our energy security and at the same time it represents a massive opportunity for the UK economy and jobs,’ he said, breaking the world record for the number of times a person can be wrong in a single sentence. Nuclear doesn’t provide energy security, the economics of it are lousy, and it doesn’t guarantee long term jobs. Is Brown deluded, easily influenced or lying? Which of those qualities would you welcome in your head of state?
On top of that, Sellafield does not have the right connections to the national grid. Incredibly expensive changes will have to be made before the reactor could begin supplying the nation. Who would pay for those changes? You guessed it – the taxpayer via huge government subsidies.
Brown also stated that building new reactor would create 10,000 jobs – 9,000 workers building it and 1,000 operating it after completion. The UK has very little nuclear expertise with many specialists retired or dead. Such is the shortfall in skills that retired nuclear inspectors are being paid to come out of retirement.
The firms bidding to build the UK’s fleet of new reactors are all from overseas. Does Brown really expect those companies to train 10,000 new specialists with all the associated costs in the current economic climate? Isn’t it more likely that the companies will import their own experienced workers? That’s what happened in Bulgaria after the government made similar boasts as Brown – a lack of native experts saw an influx of overseas engineers. Whether a reactor requires so many workers to build and operate it is also doubtful – just where does Brown get his figures? They weren’t whispered in his ear by representatives of the nuclear industry by any chance?
Plans are also in motion to establish a deep geological storage facility in the area for high-level nuclear waste. Back in 1997, the British government spent a massive half a billion pounds on a survey that told them such a facility wasn’t possible. So what has changed in just ten years to make the plan worth re-examining?
Gordon Brown can’t and won’t tell us. After his relaxing little Sellafield photo opportunity (the visiting media didn’t ask any difficult questions), he jumped back into his helicopter and took to the skies once more, his head very firmly in the clouds.
(A just to add little more spice to the drama, scientists at the UK’s Manchester University have found that erosion on England’s north west coast could see Sellafield slip into the sea within the next 100 years.)
