Ed Miliband’s White Paper on the de-carbonisation of Britain is very welcome, especially its proposals to ensure that renewables secure proper access to the grid. Regrettaly however in one important respect it remains imprisoned within the traditional energy ideology of the past, namely its obeisance to nuclear as a necessary part of the energy mix ‘to keep the lights on’. This is a false claim on at least half a dozen counts. It will not keep the lights on since no new nuclear power station will be built before 2021, and Britain’s energy gap is projected for 2015-2020. It will generate unconscionable quantities of long-term toxic and highly dangerous nuclear waste for which no country has yet found a safe and secure method of disposal, and which is estimated in Britain’s case to involve up to half a million tonnes by the end of this century. Civil nuclear power risks the spread of nuclear weapons proliferation, as the current dilemma over Iran shows all too poignantly. The areas round nuclear power stations have repeatedly been shown to exhibit much higher than normal rates of cancer and leukaemia. The decommissioning and waste management of the first round of nuclear stations has been estimated by the NDA to cost at least £73bn, 5% of Britain’s entire GDP. And the risk of a catastrophic nuclear accident can never be entirely eliminated. But there is one further aspect of the nuclear record which is regularly ignored, but which demonstrates that the experience of nuclear is far more disastrous than has been admitted.

If you want to see the nuclear future, you have only to look at Sellafield, in particular at 4 buildings within it. One of them, B30, has been called “the most hazardous industrial building in western Europe”. That is not Greenpeace’s description, it comes from George Beveridge, the deputy managing director at Sellafield. Heaps of old nuclear reactor parts and decaying fuel rods, of unknown origin and age, lie in the radioactive water in the cooling pond at the centre of B30, including contaminated metal that over time has sissolved into sludge emitting heavy doses of radiation. Alongside is B38, which Beveridge calls “the second most hazarous industrial building in Europe”, where reactor fuel rods and their radioactive cladding were tossed into its cooling pond without being properly processed during the miners’ strike in 1972. The estimated cost of clearing up this vast pile of lethal residues in the dark heart of Sellafield is estimated at £50bn over the next century.
As if this were not enough, there are two other legacy buildings that lie between Britain’s first atomic reactors known rather crudely, but accurately, as Pile 1 and Pile 2. B41 still stores the aluminium cladding for the uranium fuel rods which were burnt inside the two Piles, mixed now with magnesium and argon gas (to prevent the aluminium and magnesium catching fire and causing widespread contamination). Alongside is B29, containing a huge covered cooling pond that once stretched between the two Piles, and its thick waters now conceal several tonnes of waste and old fuel, though no-one knows what else. As with B30 and B38, the problem is that once highly radioactive and extremely hot fuel rods and cladding were put into water to cool, they gradually disintegrated and then posed a serious hazard if a pond wall were to be breached.
This slow-motion Chernobyl should prompt a re-think of the Government plan for a nuclear new build at 11 possible sites around Britain. Of course the nuclear industry is in denial. They claim the new reactors will produce little waste (but by comparison with the half a million tonnes expected to be generated by decommissioning and waste management by the end of this century, even a little would be enormous) and that all the waste can be safely reprocessed (though Sellafield’s MOX plant has dramatically failed and no site for long-term nuclear waste storage has yet been identified). In addition, under the Government’s plans the taxpayer will still end up paying most of the costs, which will be enormous, for waste storage and any possible accidents that might occur. We need nuclear like a hole in the head.

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