ConDemned to a nuclear nightmare

When Japan and Germany decided to halt nuclear power dependency in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster, some hoped it was a turning point. But the deal with French and Chinese corporations announced today marks an abrupt end to the dream that nuclear power might be phased out.

Instead, vast amounts of taxpayers’ money is to be handed to French and Chinese state-owned corporations to build a new power station in Somerset and be guaranteed a minimum price for the power it will generate in ten year's time.  

Hinkley Point will become the first new nuclear plant in Europe since Fukushima. That plant continues to leak massively to this day and was the second worst nuclear accident after Chernobyl in 1986. Then, radioactive fallout equivalent to 20 Hiroshima bombs damaged the health of countless people in northern Europe and continues to blight their lives.

The price agreed for power generation at Hinkley is at double the current market rate. This means that the companies are guaranteed longer-term revenues of around £80bn, according to some calculations. A scandal, or what?

The government has agreed to provide some £10bn guarantees to build the power station, thus subsidising nuclear energy at a higher rate than renewables – which are becoming more and more economic.

EDF, which is almost entirely owned by the French state, took over British Energy in 2008-9 and now operates 15 nuclear reactors in the UK. Nuclear expansion received a huge boost after the Blair governments enthusiastically endorsed it.

New Labour’s enthusiasm was matched a few years later by that of former anti-nuclear campaigner George Monbiot, who experienced a strange conversion in 2011 after Fukushima, when he declared himself pro-nuclear and made a vicious attack on the highly respected, Dr Helen Caldicott.

Despite the fact that the nuclear industry is so dangerously accident-prone, the companies chosen by Osborne and his ConDem clique are most obviously the least transparent and least responsible organisations to run such a dangerous industry.

There is absolutely no reason to believe that EDF and CGN will be any less negligent or open to scrutiny than the companies which built and supplied the nuclear reactors behind the Fukushima disaster.

Quite the opposite. Earlier this year, EDF pursued anti-fracking campaigners No Dash For Gas for £5m. EDF dropped its lawsuit eventually but only after the protesters agreed to a permanent injunction against entering EDF sites.

Less well-known is no doubt the fact that the head and deputy head of EDF’s nuclear security operation were jailed for three years each by a French Court in 2011.  They had spied on Greenpeace and hacked into the organisation’s computer systems.

Any misdoings by the Chinese state-owned CGN will virtually untraceable or accountable. Greenpeace campaigner in Hong Kong, Prentice Koo, warns that "Their [Chinese nuclear operators] track record is really bad and that they never give reasons for nuclear accidents.”

He told the BBC’s China reporter that "The nuclear industry in China enjoys such a privileged position that they have to pay only very limited sums in compensation if there is any major incident."

Thus, EDF and its Chinese partners will profit handsomely but are most unlikely to be responsible for any accidents or clean-up. So, cheap power generation, safety, transparency, accountability? You have to be joking.

Going nuclear at vast expense is a desperate act by a country without a sustainable energy strategy. It won’t even help to keep the lights on as it's a decade away. Consumers will pay through the nose and no doubt be asked to foot the eventual bill for storing radioactive waste.

Energy minister Michael Fallon is hailing the process as a “nuclear renaissance”. Actually, it’s more like an expensive nuclear nightmare the ConDems are holding out before us. 

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Sellafield nuclear waste still a clear and present danger

The situation at Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria is dire and poses significant risks to people and the environment. Historic neglect, poor planning and a failure to minimize hazards – that’s the history of decommissioning the site of Britain’s first nuclear accident in 1957 when the plant was known as Windscale.

For 50 years, whoever has been in charge (and that has changed frequently), has failed to develop any plan for safe decommissioning and long-term waste storage. The whole sorry (and dangerous) saga is detailed in a new report from the National Audit Office (NAO).

The timetable is slipping further and further, and the reality is that it is a job that simply can’t be done within the current framework of government negligence and lying.

The NAO says the operators still have no plan for storing waste and have no idea how much it will cost to maintain it safely for hundreds of years until it ceases to be a danger.

The current budget for decommissioning is put at £67bn. But over the last ten years, projected costs have increased almost £1bn every year, so the figure is meaningless.

There is enough waste to fill 27 Olympic-sized swimming pools on the site and some of it is being stored in buildings and containers in a poor state of repair.

There are 240 nuclear buildings, and so far only 55 have been decommissioned. Out of 13 contracts, 12 have been of poor quality and not value for money, the NAO found. Dr Ruth Balogh, of West Cumbria and North Lakes Friends of the Earth, commented:

"The UK's failure to deal with highly hazardous nuclear waste at Sellafield is a national scandal that poses a significant risk to local people and the environment. The government has completely ignored the urgent need for interim measures to deal with this radioactive waste. We shouldn't build any new nuclear reactors if we can't deal with the radioactive mess that's already been created."

But the government is not listening. They have just signed a deal with Hitachi to build nuclear reactors at Wylfa in Anglesey and Oldbury in Gloucestershire. Hitachi bought out the German-owned Horizon consortium, which withdrew from the project earlier this year.

In the longer term, Hitachi says it wants to build six reactors on existing nuclear sites where power stations are coming to the end of their life.

Their “boiling water” system is new to the UK and risk assessments would normally take years. However, the government may find ways to cut the assessment period, and with the new planning regulations, people living round the sites will not be able to delay projects with legal challenges.

Talking up the deal, claiming billions in investment and thousands of jobs, David Cameron was entirely silent on where the waste will go when these new reactors run down after 60 years. They don’t even know where they are going to put the waste from those currently reaching the end of their lives and almost ready for decommissioning.

Efforts to bribe local authorities to agree to become waste storage locations, initiated by New Labour, have failed. Only Copeland, in west Cumbria has agreed. It is the district round Sellafield and is one the UK’s poorest areas, partly as a result of the devastation caused by playing host to the UK’s biggest nuclear hazard. Some 70% of the current waste is already in temporary storage at Sellafield.

Energy and climate change secretary Edward Davey claims that Hitachi bring with them “decades of expertise, and are responsible for building some of the most advanced nuclear reactors on time and on budget”. Yes, that includes their participation in building the reactors at Fukushima!

The government boasts that none of the new nuclear power stations will get any public subsidy – but fails to mention the cost of storing the waste. It is the ultimate in short-termism, in profit-driven madness and abject failure of governments to put people and the environment ahead of the big energy corporations when they plan our energy future.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

How nuclear power decision was 'fixed'

Parliament was conned by New Labour and the ConDem coalition into supporting new nuclear power stations by distorted evidence and research that ignored important alternatives to achieve emissions cuts, including energy saving measures.

The truth behind this massive deception is revealed in new report that describes the way the decision was taken to build 10 new nuclear power stations as “a corruption of governance”.

MPs were told that without an expansion of nuclear energy, the UK would be unable to meet its target for reduction of harmful greenhouse gas emissions. The phrase "unable to keep the lights on" was used time and again.

In reality, the decision to build the 10 power stations was taken first, behind the scenes, and all the research and modelling from then on was designed to prove they were needed. Figures for future energy demand were largely invented and placed at the absolute highest level.

Unlock Democracy and the Association for the Conservation of Energy, joint authors of the report, made repeated requests to the Department for Energy and Climate Change to see the demand projections justifying nuclear claims. Finally, they received this admission: "DECC has not made any long-term projections of electricity demand supply. Our latest projections were published up to 2022 and we have previously published figures to 2025. DECC is developing scenarios of potential electricity demand/supply to 2050 but don’t have any definite figures for this yet."

The government claimed that by 2025 an additional 60 gigawatts of power generation would be needed. But the consultants employed by the government were not even asked to assess actual need for new capacity, and they did not do so. They simply assessed the options for achieving the government's stated goal of achieving 29% of electricity from renewable sources by 2020. As the report explains:

"In a nutshell what [the consultants] did was add up the government’s proposed policies, including the 29% renewables figure and the proposed new nuclear capacity (plus other proposed new capacity) and call that a ‘central assumption’ of need'. However this is not an assessment of need, it is an estimate of predicted generating capacity, which is altogether different."

Then the Brown New Labour government referenced this simple addition as the independent analytical source for their assumption of future need, say the two organisations who point out that they are not formally opposed to nuclear energy.

"In other words, the pre-determined policy of 10 new nuclear power stations created the ‘central assumption’ of the need for them. Rather than the need driving the policy, the policy dictated the so-called need," the report states.

The incoming coalition government commissioned some further research, modelling 16 different “pathways” to meeting both future energy needs and emissions targets by 2050. These were the basis for last year's vote accepting the need for an expansion nuclear power, but they were based on the same assumptions.

The claim is that the demand for electricity will double or even triple by 2050 but there is no evidence for this. In fact one of the government's own documents states that four different scenarios were modelled on the need for electricity until 2025 and these “scenarios all suggest that electricity demand in 2025 will be at approximately the same levels as today”. And the National Grid is planning on the basis of a similar assumption.

Just before this report was published, realising the cat was out of the bag, the DECC did finally publish some figures showing that focusing on funding for energy saving brought cost savings and greater CO2 reductions.

So it is clear that under pressure from the energy corporations, the government agreed in principle to build 10 new nuclear power stations and then manipulated the data to prove they were needed. These will cost the taxpayer billions of pounds, require public provision of storage for dangerous waste, and keep people on the treadmill of ever-increasing bills.

It would be cheaper for the public purse, and cheaper for consumers, to focus instead on energy saving. But there's no profit for the energy giants in that scenario, so it was hidden from MPs. Will they now revisit this decision and rescind it? Not likely!

Penny Cole
Environment editor

Coalition takes greenwash to a new level

ConDem coalition energy policy is being made on the run, in secret and in cahoots with the energy corporations. The self-styled “greenest-ever government” is engaged in a behind-the-scenes dash for fossil fuel and nuclear.

Here’s the evidence for the prosecution:

1. Having closed down one loss-making fuel reprocessing plant at Sellafield, the government has announced plans to build another at a cost of £3bn of taxpayers’ money. So much for claims that new nuclear plants will have to be financed privately, including dealing with waste. The plant will try to transform Britain’s stockpile of nuclear waste into mox (mixed-oxide) fuel for a new generation of thermal light water reactors. As Douglas Parr, policy director at Greenpeace UK, said: "This proposal will lead to a subsidised plant creating subsidised fuel so that subsidised operators can produce subsidised electricity and then receive subsidised waste disposal. The only winners in this are the nuclear operators, already rich with their 18% domestic fuel price rises this year."

2. The government has been passing on details of Greenpeace’s legal challenge to new nuclear plants, to the Nuclear Industry Association and even directly to French nuclear giant EDF, the most likely candidate to build any new plants. Greenpeace has complained to the High Court and says it is an abuse of power that “prevents democratic scrutiny”.

3. Green MP Caroline Lucas has exposed oil and nuclear industry penetration and influence in Whitehall. She has found that 50 employees from companies like EDF, Npower and Centrica have been seconded to work on energy issues in government departments, free of charge, over the past four years. "Companies such as the big six energy firms do not lend their staff to government for nothing – they expect a certain degree of influence, insider knowledge and preferential treatment in return," said Lucas, who also found that the government had met with the “big six” producers and the power trade associations almost 200 times since the May 2010 election.

4. The government has been covertly passing information to Canadian diplomats lobbying to stop the European Union classifying oil extracted from tar sands as having a heavy carbon footprint - which of course it does. This would make the oil less attractive to European fuel suppliers, trying to meet requirements under the Fuel Quality Directive.

5. In his autumn statement, Chancellor Osborne took £1bn out of the budget that had been set aside to develop carbon capture and storage to spend on other new infrastructure. He promised £250m of public money to help industries with high emissions of greenhouse gas subvert EU carbon caps, and also pledged a review of “green regulations” to “clear the way for development and economic growth”. In other words, dump them all.

6. The draft rules for the government’s much-vaunted Green Investment Bank would not allow it carry through a plan to make millions of homes more energy efficient. Instead the bank will have to invest on commercial terms and show a profit. As a result, it is unlikely to invest in areas that are good for the environment, but deemed too risky by other lenders, though that was supposed to be the point. The bank’s funding is no longer put at £3bn but “up to £3bn” and it will not start operating until 2016 at the earliest.

We hereby find this government guilty of greenwash, building extensively on the example of their New Labour predecessors, and we award environment secretary Chris Huhne the “hypocrite of the year award 2011”. How do they sleep at night? No problem because they are fulfilling their role as they see it - promoting growth at all costs during what is rapidly turning into a global slump of the capitalist system.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

Can capitalism keep the lights on?

The claim that the crisis at the Fukushima power plant is a Japanese problem because they foolishly built nuclear reactors on an earthquake fault is fatally flawed. As climate change brings more and more extreme weather events, there are many other reactors at risk, from inundation by rising sea levels to damage from hurricanes.

What can happen as a result can be seen from the deterioration in the situation at Fukushima, with continual leaks of dangerous radiation into the air, sea and soil. UN nuclear monitors have urged the Japanese government to expand the evacuation zone round the plant from 20km to 40km. The UK and US governments have told their citizens living in Japan to move at least 80km away from the plant.

Emissions of radioactive iodine and caesium, the isotopes most readily absorbed by the human body, are rising towards the levels that followed the Chernobyl disaster of 1986.

Austrian researchers using a worldwide network of radiation detectors have found iodine-131 at daily levels 73% of those seen at Chernobyl, and caesium-137 at 60%. Researchers are still trying to assess how many new cancer cases have been caused by caesium released at Chernobyl.

Iodine causes thyroid cancer and caesium builds up in the bones, remaining in the body for up to 30 years. Levels of radioactive iodine in seawater off-shore from the Fukushima plant rose by 25% in one day and are now 4,385 times the legal limit. As the concentration increases, so the affected area spreads. A ban on fishing 20km offshore won’t be enough.

The Japanese government says it will consider the UN’s advice about expanding the exclusion zone, but that it doesn’t seem urgent. Citizens disagree, with big anti-nuclear protests taking place on the streets of Tokyo and other cities.

The plant’s owners, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) have announced that all four reactors will have to be decommissioned and the company cannot survive this disaster. Behind the scenes, the Japanese government is considering nationalising the company.

As a result, Japanese taxpayers will have to cover the cost of decommissioning and the massive clean up operation. Radiation levels around the plant mean crops and milk will not be useable for many years and it could be decades before it is safe for refugees to return to the area.

Many countries have begun to rethink their nuclear future, including Britain according to coalition deputy prime minister Nick Clegg. But without nuclear power, capitalism faces a massive gap in energy supply.

The response is not to immediately invest in renewable energy however – it is the exact opposite. For example, the Spanish government has slashed its subsidies for solar power, as part of its cuts programme and in response to pressure from big fossil-fuel generating companies Iberdrola, Endesa and Gas Natural.

Instead, the rush is backwards, to the dirtiest forms of fossil fuel. The Obama administration has just given the go-ahead for an expansion in coal mining on federal land, enough to raise the country’s annual climate pollution by more than half. And major oil companies, facilitated by governments, are pushing ahead with the polluting process of extracting shale oil from tar sands.

As energy supplies dwindle, the poorest will pay the price, with rising fuel bills and higher prices for basics such as food and clothes. Capitalism is struggling to sustain “business as usual” from the planet’s dwindling energy resources, and now the question is, can it even keep the lights on? There is clearly no solution within the current economic and political framework of production of energy and commodities for profit.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Profits loom larger than cost of human misery

Analysts are at work trying to minimise the damage to the profitability of the capitalist system from the disaster in Japan. Never mind the towns and villages cut off from all contact without access to food or medical supplies or facing radiation poisoning - the bottom line is the priority.

Big business and the markets are asking what will be the net effect on the oil price if revolution erupts in Saudi Arabia, cutting its production, but demand in Japan falls? And what will that do to the prospects of a global double-dip recession?

In Japan, ports, airports, highways and most manufacturing plants have closed, and the government has predicted “considerable impact on a wide range of our country’s economic activities”.

The damage to nuclear reactors is beyond the worst of the worst case predictions. Eleven reactors are shut down, at least four are broken beyond repair. Swathes of economic activity are at a standstill, and more will follow. Oil imports are bound to soar, adding to the country’s crisis.

Japan is the world’s third largest national economy, having slipped behind China after two decades of unremitting recession. Throughout the period production by world famous brands like Sony, Mitsubishi, Toyota has been kept afloat on an ocean of debt.

After a series of failed attempts to kick start a return to growth, its accumulated national debt was already by far the world’s highest at 225% of gross domestic product. Government income from taxes covers less than half the budget, and pension funds are becoming net sellers of bonds to meet payouts to the elderly.

The Bank of Japan has made 21.8 trillion yen ($US265 billion) available to financial institutions and doubled its asset-buying program to 10 trillion yen, but it hasn’t been enough to stop a global collapse of share values. Japan’s banks are now vulnerable because of the subsequent fall in the value of their equity assets.

As the Financial Times reported: “Economists generally welcomed the central bank’s move as a measure to quell potential panic over access to funds in the wake of a major disaster. But some said the liquidity injection was not likely to be enough to counter the negative impact of the quake and tsunami on the Japanese economy, already weakened by a strong yen and deflationary pressures.”

As the tragedy unfolds, those who operate in the financial markets are weighing their options. Their only concerns are for how money can be made out of the destruction. Reconstruction will need to be funded from somewhere, and that means a big expansion of credit –at a price.

The cost of further borrowing is already on the rise as lenders pile the pressure on the distressed country, just as they are doing in Portugal (whose debt was downgraded last night), Ireland (desperately seeking to renegotiate its bail-out) Greece (paying a staggering 13% to borrow on the bond markets) and Spain (which needs an estimated €130 billion to recapitalise its banks).

The movement of the earth’s crust, hidden from view, has brought two things into even sharper relief:

- continued pursuit of a for-profit system of growth fuelled by oil and nuclear power is simply not sustainable.

- the historic necessity of creating a not-for-profit society in which people produce what they need in a way which repairs the damage to the planet’s eco-system resulting from decades of corporate exploitation.

Today’s unemployment figures in Britain, showing a 17-year high at over 2.5 million, add to the urgency to create an alternative path for humanity in every country.

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

Faustian pact with nuclear power

Many have praised the Japanese people’s resilience and preparedness in response to the earthquake and tsunami which has killed thousands of people with many more unaccounted for.

But as a second explosion at the Yukushima nuclear plant releases another blast of radiation into the atmosphere, what began as a natural disaster is being made worse by what is described as human folly.

However, we are not talking about human madness in general so much as the interests of power-generating companies and governments in their thrall. Why build 53 nuclear power plants in a country which lies directly on earthquake fault-lines and which only 16 years ago experienced a major disaster in the city of Kobe?

The wisdom of building more and more plants, not only in earthquake-prone areas, but near urban centres is being questioned around the world, as peak oil drives capitalist governments to switch to nuclear power generation in an almost desperate effort to diversify energy sources.

Naturally there are those who would prefer to leave the nuclear industry alone to get on with tapping the public purse. In the United States for example, one politician claims that it would be "poor form for anyone to criticise the nuclear industry, or pronounce the end of nuclear power, because of a natural disaster that has been a national tragedy for the Japanese people".

Others, however, have pointed clearly to the danger of increasing reliance on nuclear power generation. A leading seismologist, Ishibashi Katsuhiko warned in 2007 about the likelihood of just such an accident. Katsuhiko, an expert in urban safety at Kobe University, has said that Japan’s government, the power industry and the academic community had all underestimated the potential risks posed by major quakes.

He points out that over past decades the power of earthquakes has grown far greater than Japanese plants were designed to survive. In addition, deliberate falsification of data caused a scandal at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in 2002. Managers there at first refused to admit inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Authority Agency (IAEA).

Politicians in virtually every country have been singing the praises of increased dependence on nuclear power stations, all of them constructed with huge government subsidies. Sixty reactors are in construction around the globe. According to the World Nuclear Association "another 150 or more planned to come on line during the next 10 years, and over 200 further back in the pipeline".

Ed Miliband, as energy secretary, in 2009 approved 10 more for Britain. None of them will be built without massive state support. Energy corporations are already suggesting a carbon tax that could cost the average household more than £200 extra per year. After initial doubts, Prime Minister David Cameron is now a "convert".

The result of the expansion programme will be a huge increase in uranium mining, with new operations already being opened up in Namibia and Kazakhstan.

Uranium mining exposes miners and their communities to high levels of carcinogenic radon gas. There is no safe way of disposing of waste, which also carries significant health risks.

The idea that nuclear is a contribution to reduced carbon emissions is rubbish. The result of extracting the uranium and the billions of tons of cement needed to build all these huge plants will be massive CO2 emissions. It is unlikely any future savings in emissions would offset this early surge over the whole life of a reactor.

A study by the Rocky Mountain Institute, which campaigns for rational use of the world’s resources, says that if every dollar spent on nuclear power were invested instead in energy efficiency measures, it would produce seven times greater reduction in carbon emissions. But the corporations are not going to get profits from energy efficiency – and people using less fuel means smaller profits for them.

In Japan, the trauma of losing entire towns to the tsunami and the rescue operation may for the time being put the nuclear issue into the background. But the political fall-out could be just beginning as confidence in those who blithely continue the Faustian pact with nuclear power plummets further.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Poisoned legacy of nuclear option

Wildfires raging across Russia are spreading towards the highly contaminated forests of the Bryansk region, threatening to release low-dose nuclear radiation resulting from the Chernobyl disaster of almost 25 years ago.

The Russian government claims that only two fires have broken out in Bryansk and that they have been put out. However Greenpeace has published a map that suggests there are, or have been, more than 20 fires in the area.

The impact on health of low-dose nuclear radiation combined with smog generated by the fires, plus the horrific heat, which continues in Russia’s hottest summer since records began, is not easy to predict.

It’s a reminder of the long-term damage caused by the world’s worst nuclear accident, when in 1986 one of four nuclear reactors exploded at Chernobyl, spreading nuclear material right across Europe. Whole areas of Russia and Belarus are still no-go zones and high levels of birth defects and thyroid cancer have been identified.

The original concrete sarcophagus enclosing the exploded reactor is crumbling to dust, and a massive new steel structure is being constructed on site at an estimated cost of $1.4bn. It is hoped it will contain the radiation for 100 years.

At the same time, the ConDem government has published its annual energy strategy review, and whilst nuclear power warrants only a short paragraph, reading between the lines one can see that it is a key part of the coalition’s plans.

Indeed energy secretary Chris Huhne was quick to respond to an accusation in the Financial Times that the government was not pursuing the nuclear option and that “green dogma threatens to saddle it with the wrong energy policies”.

Former nuclear opponent Huhne promised the FT: “I have said clearly – most recently in the annual energy statement – that nuclear power will play a important part in our future energy mix, and that the government will continue with all the facilitating measures such as streamlined planning and the national policy statements.

“Moreover, nuclear power will benefit from the framework put in place to encourage low carbon electricity generation, such as the European Union’s emissions trading scheme and our own plans for a carbon price floor to provide greater investor certainty.” Huhne said that the industry would not receive public subsidies but that he was “confident that there will be new nuclear power as planned by 2018.”

What this actually means is that the government is not going to directly subsidise nuclear power, but is pushing to raise the floor for the European Union carbon price, so that new nuclear power stations are potentially profitable, not only in the UK but across Europe.

And with the planned closure of a number of coal-fired power stations, and a predicted shortfall in electricity generation in the UK in coming years, the nuclear option looks even better for shareholders.

This is the same Huhne who wrote in 2007: "Nuclear is a tried, tested and failed technology. New nuclear would be economically foolhardy, environmentally irresponsible and pose long-term security questions that are impossible to address.

"If we opt for a new generation of nuclear reactors, future generations may rue the day. We will be encumbering them with high costs and enormous and unknowable liabilities. We will miss a key opportunity to pioneer a green future." Quite!

Having entered the coalition, and accepted the logic of the continuation of the profit and growth-driven, privatised, energy industry, all Huhne’s former opposition to nuclear inevitably disappears. In the context of capitalist short-termism, nuclear can successfully masquerade as a low-carbon, “green”, option. Nuclear has certainly fooled a lot of people!

The issue of disposing of toxic nuclear waste will be fudged, and left as a problem for future generations to tackle, just as generations of Byelorussians and Russians continue to live with the poisoned inheritance of Chernobyl.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

Risks ignored as Obama leads nuclear charge

President Obama fired the starting pistol for a rush to nuclear power in the US when he announced this week that his government will offer $8.3billion in loan guarantees for two nuclear reactors to be built in Georgia. This puts the US in line with other big powers, where the stampede to build a new generation of nuclear power stations is on.

China has 14 reactors under construction and 35 more planned. India has six under construction and 23 planned. Even Russia, where you would think the safety lesson might have been learned after Chernobyl, has eight under construction and eight more planned. And of course, New Labour recently gave the go-ahead for 10 new plants in the UK.

The result of the expansion programme will be a massive increase in uranium mining, with new operations already being opened up in Namibia and Kazakhstan, which has tripled its uranium output over the past four years and will soon overtake Canada as the world’s biggest producer. Just as with oil, the easy stuff is taken first and then dirtier processes employed to get at the harder to reach ore.

There is no recognition on the part of governments or the nuclear industry of the extensive health and environmental risks at every stage of the nuclear life cycle. As the American organisation Physicians for Social Responsibility says, uranium mining exposes miners and their communities to high levels of carcinogenic radon gas:

“The effects have been so devastating in the United States that the Navajo Nation, upon whose lands sit one of the largest uranium reserves in the world, has outright banned the practice, even as they struggle with crushing poverty. Radio nuclides routinely released in nuclear reactor operations have been linked to developmental problems, birth defects, reproductive problems, cardiovascular disease, leukemia and other cancers. Epidemiological studies of children living near nuclear reactors show a positive association between leukemia and proximity to nuclear reactors.”

We have experience of that in the UK with the identified clusters of childhood leukemia found around Sellafield in Cumbria in the 1980s. There is no safe way of disposing of waste, which also carries significant health risks, particularly associated with leaching into water supplies.

A scandal exposed this week shows the blatant disregard for human health of the nuclear industry. The French newspaper Liberation published photographs of what appears to be nuclear waste from French EDF reactors simply lying in the open, on the ground in a Siberian town to which access is forbidden.

EDF energy, part-owned by the French state and the world’s biggest nuclear operator, admits it is exporting waste to Russia and that only 13% of what it sends comes back reprocessed. What happens to the rest? No comment. EDF is the likely candidate for constructing new plants in Britain.

The question governments can’t answer is why they are doing it? The idea that nuclear is clean and green, and a contribution to reduced carbon emissions is rubbish. The result of extracting the uranium and the billions of tons of cement needed to build all these huge plants will be massive CO2 emissions. It is unlikely any future savings in emissions would offset this early surge over the whole life of a reactor.

A study by the Rocky Mountain Institute, which campaigns for rational use of the world’s resources, says that if every dollar spent on nuclear power were invested instead in energy efficiency measures, it would produce seven times greater reduction in carbon emissions.

But the corporations are not going to get profits from energy efficiency – and people using less fuel means smaller profits for them. The shadow governments of the corporations are pulling the strings for energy planning. For an alternative way to meet energy needs see our Manifesto of Revolutionary solutions.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

New Labour's nuclear nightmare

Nothing shows more clearly that capitalism has reached a dead end in its historical development than the plans for nuclear and coal announced this week by New Labour energy secretary Ed Miliband.

Nuclear power is the embodiment of the reckless nature of capitalism; the fact that it is the state that is imposing this development on society shows the extent to which democracy is dead.

The 10 sites for new nuclear power stations are at Braystones, Sellafield and Kirksanton, all in Cumbria, Heysham in Lancashire, Hartlepool, Co Durham, Sizewell in Suffolk, Bradwell in Essex, Hinkley Point in Somerset, Oldbury in Gloucestershire and Wylfa in Anglesey. Dungeness in Kent was ruled out because of fears of rising sea levels.

To prevent any opposition – which Miliband describes as a “barrier” to progress - new planning laws prevent people affected by these developments from using any remnant of democracy to halt them. The Infrastructure Planning Commission has been given the power to take applications from power company developers and make decisions within a year.

To class nuclear as a “clean” technology is simply madness. The government is no further forward on making plans to deal with the radioactive waste product because there is no safe way of storing it. Their only plan is to bribe some local authority to agree to offer deep storage. The area around Sellafield – already devastated economically by that development – is a prime candidate. The cost to the taxpayer will be in the billions.

Nor is nuclear energy renewable. Miliband claims his plans will deliver “energy security”, yet there is no fissile material in the UK – it must all be imported. And as the rest of the capitalist world also turns to nuclear, uranium wars may join the oil wars.

Miliband’s claim that new nuclear power stations will be built without public subsidy is quite simply a lie. Building a nuclear power station is beyond the means of an energy company and corporations are already pressuring the government to offer subsidies, suggesting a carbon tax that could cost the average household more than £200 extra per year.

Subsidies are already on offer to companies who fit carbon capture and storage to coal-fired stations, and that will cost the average household between £11 and £15 from 2020. Apparently, the hand-outs are not enough and overall, private sector investment in the energy sector has collapsed as a result of the recession.

The world's energy systems will need an extra $10.5 trillion (£6.3trn) in investment between now and 2030 to reduce dependence on fossil fuels and avoid "irreparable damage to the planet", the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates.

Sounds massive? But even in a no-change scenario, energy across the world will require $26 trillion investment from now until 2030 to meet growing energy demands in the developing world.

Why not ensure that this investment is in renewables? According to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, current renewable energy technology could reduce emissions to pre 2000 levels while making a profit on at least 50% of implemented technologies.

But the problem is that the kind of investment required does not in any way fit the fast buck model which brought the financial sector to its knees last year, and which is now once again picking up speed. And that is the only investment model that 21st century capitalism has to offer.

The giant energy corporations are not looking to invest in reducing global warming – and nor are crisis-hit governments. All they can do is to go on offering subsidies of our money to ruthless corporations. What Miliband is proposing is peanuts compared to the billions of dollars annually in tax breaks and other funding that the US government gives the oil corporations.

Only by revolutionising the energy sector and placing it in democratically-controlled public ownership, can we bring about the transformation needed. Then we can start reducing carbon emissions and find ways to deliver clean, safe, affordable energy for all.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

Greenwash won't wash

Politicians, local government and business leaders, gathered in London yesterday at a giant greenwash conference sponsored by The Guardian newspaper and (you couldn’t make it up) by energy giant E-On. Yes that’s E-On, the company planning to build vast new polluting coal-fired power stations across the country with the government’s enthusiastic support.

Delegates were discussing how to re-engage the public in the debate and overcome “climate change fatigue” and scepticism. They were treated to a video contribution from prime minister Brown. What did he say? We don’t know – it was either so top secret or so dull that it hasn’t even made The Guardian’s own pages.

But he did make a speech on Monday about the transition to a post-oil economy, where he insisted that Britain must build more nuclear power stations. Brown called for "a renaissance of nuclear power", adding: "Britain is moving quickly to replace its ageing fleet of nuclear power stations. All around the world I see renewed interest in this technology, as countries contemplate the alternative - continued oil dependence and unchecked climate change."

His officials claim Brown that believes the new reactors could be working by 2017 (although 2030 is more realistic), and that this will be made easier by new planning laws which will cut out public opposition. These new laws are heading for the statute book after all but a few Labour MPs dropped their opposition to the fast-trick procedures at the last minute.

Brown wants to replace the nine existing power stations, which are rapidly becoming obsolete, on the same sites, but possibly building more than one in each location. They will be of the European Pressurised Reactor model, currently under construction in France and Finland. Or rather not under construction in France. In fact, since Brown made his speech at President Nicolas Sarkozy's "Club Med" conference of EU and Mediterranean states in Paris, one can imagine Sarkozy whispering to him behind his hand: “Gordon, Gordon, we ‘ave ‘ad to stop work on our new reactor – eet eez a deesasterr.”

The French nuclear safety agency stopped work on the new EPR reactor in Flamanville in May this year, only six months after it began, when it found serious problems with quality of construction work. Greenpeace reports: “Cracks have already been observed at part of the base slab beneath the reactor building. The supplier of the steel containment liner reportedly lacks the necessary qualifications. Fabrication of the liner was continuing despite quality failures demonstrating the lack of competence of the supplier. As a result, one-quarter of the welds of the steel liner of the reactor containment building were deficient.” And the other EPR, in Finland, has been under construction for more than two years and costs have doubled.

It is entirely likely that Brown’s nuclear fantasy will never come to fruition – it does have something of a megalomaniac fantasy about it. But that is not the point. As Greenpeace says: “We only have a limited time and budget to stave off the most catastrophic effects of climate change and we must stop pouring money down the nuclear black hole.”

Involving the public in debate and overcoming scepticism won’t be achieved by more sponsored greenwash, but by a clear expression of the causes and future impacts of climate change alongside a programme to tackle it. Most people believe that climate change becomes just another excuse for the government to levy more taxes and for the energy companies to make more profits – and so far they are spot on! It is time to democratise ownership and control of energy production, putting people before profit, and establishing a massive programme of publicly-funded energy efficiency, public transport and alternative energy projects. Now that would get public support.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

Brown's 'greenwash' failure

The government’s alleged environmental credentials are in ruins, with Gordon Brown’s announcement of support for a massive expansion of nuclear power, and the exposure of the “green tax” fraud. Brown has gone further than before by declaring that new nuclear power sites will be needed. And this is in addition to the even more immediate threat of a new generation of heavily polluting coal-fired power stations.

Last year the government was claiming its road tax policies were aimed at reducing car use – now the chancellor is planning to scrap them, as Labour MPs wake up to the fact that they will only drive the poorest people off the roads. The taxes also have precious little to do with changing behaviour, as they apply to cars bought as long ago as 2001!

Meanwhile, as speculators and hedge funds tighten their grip on the oil market, helping to send fuel prices soaring, the government is like a frightened rabbit caught in the headlights. In the autumn the big utility companies are planning further increases in domestic fuel prices. Mark Todd, the director of energy-helpline.com, says: "This winter we have had the credit crunch. Next winter it will be the energy crunch.” He warned British consumers could face a 66% rise in gas prices by January, and similar increases in electricity.

Consumers got a taste of things to come on Tuesday, when several power stations shut down at the same time leaving half a million homes and businesses without power. After that, the price of gas for next winter reached a record 99.5p a therm, double the level a year ago. That increase will be passed on to the consumer, not only in higher fuel bills but in higher costs for food and other essentials.

The government was also forced this week to defend its commitment to the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism, in the face of new reports exposing it as an expensive fraud. Two academics at Stanford University, California, studied more than 3,000 CDM projects earning up to $10bn worth of carbon credits, and concluded that none of them should have qualified as they would have been built anyway. Almost every chemical, wind power or hydro electric scheme planned for China in the next four years has applied to register.

When it finally expires in 2012, it seems Kyoto will have saved a pitiful total of about 175 million tons of carbon, according to Professor Roger Pielke, Jr. at the University of Colorado’s Centre for Science and Technology Policy Research. Pielke totalled the cumulative emissions saved by CDM schemes already registered, or in the pipeline and found that the level emissions that would have been reached on January 1, 2012 will now happen just before noon on January 7, 2012. So at a cost of tens of billions of dollars, the CDM has given the planet about another 6.5 days. I suppose we should be grateful.

All the government’s hopes of meeting carbon emission reduction targets are pinned on the CDM, not on any real reductions. A note of desperation crept into their defence. A spokeswoman said: "We completely reject any assertions that it is fundamentally flawed. We've worked consistently for and seen improvement in CDM processes over the past few years of its operation. We believe the CDM is essentially transparent and robust, though we will continue to press for the environmental integrity of projects."

The facts are clear enough – the government is leaving it all to the global energy companies and to the market in carbon. It has no solutions to the fuel crisis or to climate change. The "green tax” approach has failed. Government policies are essentially a greenwash. There is an urgent need for a crash programme of energy saving and efficiency measures, along the lines of A World to Win’s Action Plan to Halt Climate Chaos. Join us today to help develop the strategy for implementing this urgent alternative.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

An Anglo-French nuclear nightmare

The very concept of a “nuclear renaissance” is such an assault on the senses that it seems that only a madman could come up with it. Yet today Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy will agree to build a new generation of Anglo-French nuclear power stations, with the aim of becoming the world’s largest exporters of nuclear technology.

Trade and Energy Minister John Hutton has already offered a terrifying insight into what the two governments have in mind. Speaking to delegates at the Unite union conference, Hutton claimed that Britain can become “the gateway to a new nuclear renaissance across Europe”. The potential scale of the investment is “breathtaking”, he said, and added: "There has never been a greater global demand for finance, equipment and skills to build and operate nuclear power stations. I want Britain to be leading the world in the development and application of this new generation of low carbon power technology."

The UK should not only replace its 23 existing nuclear reactors, but opt for a huge expansion. With “no artificial cap to constrain the potential of new build in the UK” the industry could create thousands of jobs and “the prize could be massive". That weasel phrase “no artificial cap” means the government believes anyone trying to stand in the way is guilty of creating “artificial” blockages to an economic bonanza. So let’s look at some “artificial” blockages.

First of all, in no way is nuclear a “low carbon option”. Construction of a nuclear power station would emit 20 million tonnes of CO2. It would take 100 years to generate sufficient “carbon free” electricity to offset this carbon cost. A 100 megawatt nuclear reactor needs 160 tonnes of uranium each year, processed from 16 million tonnes of rock and releasing 320 tonnes of CO2. Uranium is a non-renewable resource, which is itself already running out.

The drive to mine in new areas is opposed by indigenous communities from Namibia, Australia, Canada and the Black Hills of Dakota. To obtain one tonne of uranium means mining and milling 98,000 tonnes of rock. The refining process leaves 10% of the uranium behind, dumped as radioactive sludge. Wherever it has been mined, it has wrecked the health of people, animals and eco-systems. Here’s another “artificial blockage”. Where is the spent radioactive fuel to be stored? The government’s only plan so far is to offer bribes to some of the poorest communities if they will accept to have storage facilities.

These facts about nuclear energy are summarised in A World to Win’s book Running a Temperature, an action plan for the eco-crisis . It also sets out basic principles for an alternative approach. It proposes a massive investment of public money to insulate people’s homes. The book points out that centralised energy generation wastes power, and proposes instead the formation of local democratically-elected energy groups, which could plan the right combination of energy efficiency measures and local power generation to meet their community’s needs. They would, as far as possible, use renewable resources.

For New Labour, climate change is now simply a business opportunity – their unthinking reflex is always to support the option that suits the global corporations and generates the most profit. The challenge that we face is not just making the transition beyond oil, but the transition beyond the drive for profit, which is threatening our survival. Such a change can only be brought about by a transformation of ownership of the energy companies and the states that promote their interests.


Penny Cole
Environment editor