Cameron has often said Britain is open for business. What it seems he meant was Britain is open for sale. There is no other country in the world which would throw open its strategic industrial sectors to a foreign power. That is exactly what the Tories are now proposing to do with handing over the building and ownership of 5 new nuclear power stations to the Chinese.
Tagged with Nuclear power
The nuclear wheeze goes critical
Without a word being said, British householders and businesses are about to be forced to pay for a French nuclear loser. The two German energy companies, RWE and E.ON, announced a month ago that they were withdrawing from building new nuclear power stations at Wylfa in Anglesey and Oldbury in Gloucestershire after the German government opted for early closure of its remaining reactors. The UK company Centrica, which has an option of 20% in any new build at Hinkley and Sizewell, has a weak balance sheet and is unlikely to proceed. Continue reading
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Nuclear gravy train starts to roll
Tomorrow the Government will authorise the first of a series of subsidies to the nuclear industry which will bankroll its future to the tune of more than £1.3bn by 2020, in direct contradiction to pledges repeatedly given by Ministers that any new nuclear build would receive no public subsidy at all. Yet clause 77 of the Finance Bill being debated in Committee tomorrow will offer huge windfall profits to nuclear because it introduces a carbon floor price which increases the cost of emitting carbon for coal and gas, but nuclear will be exempt because it does not emit carbon. Nor is this the only large subsidy that this virulently pro-nuclear government, even after Fukushima, plans to shower on the nuclear lobby. Continue reading
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How is this nuclear obsession explained?
The case against nuclear is overwhelming, yet it is a fair bet that after Fukushima and after carrying out all due ‘reviews and consultations’, the Government will still go ahead with a major new nuclear build programme. Why? It says a lot more about the political networking of the nuclear industry than it does about their engineering or technological proficiency. For not one of the big put-offs about nuclear have been satisfactority answered – the catastrophic potential, the nuclear waste mountain, sharply rising costs, radiation and cancer risks, decommissioning costs, vulnerability to attack, flooding and climate change risks to reactor coastal locations, uninsurable accident liabilities, nuclear proliferation threats, the link to nuclear weapons, and many others. So how does nuclear survive? Continue reading
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Fukushima should end any nuclear revival in Britain
Angela Merkel rightly called Fukushima “a turning point for the world”. It is. This was no glitch in an unsophisticated backwater of a State that could be explained away by poor design or low operating standards; this happened in one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world with an unsurpassed reputation for detail and precaution and a commitment to a major industry with 55 reactors. Continue reading
