Rupert Read (Norwich, The Green Party): So the Cabinet has (yesterday) spinelessly given the unanimous go-ahead for our kingdom to ‘go nuclear' once again. The formal Parliamentary announcement that New Labour is taking the nuclear option will come tomorrow, but we have known for a few years now that this was a fait accompli, and that the consultation(s) would be and were a sham. It has been coming because nuclear power is seen as an easy, ‘low-carbon' option for energy, at a time when the government is desperately trying to present itself as serious about manmade climate change.
It is often said that nuclear energy has about one third the carbon emissions of standard gas-fired fossil fuel sources. But the 'one third' figure is garbage, because it excludes the long-term costs that come from decommissioning and monitoring of nuclear waste. We have to assume that even the very small amount of effort and oversight needed to keep that waste safe for thousands of human generations will cumulatively add up to a very large amount of money and a very large amount of CO2 emissions (for a back of the envelope calculation on this see my blogpost; for a more scientifically-solid and much fuller version of the same, see David Fleming's masterful report - opens pdf).
If these costs are included at all in cost-benefit analyses, they are generally 'discounted' to virtually zero within a generation or two. But this practice of 'discounting' assumes permanent economic growth - and permanent growth can only occur only if one believes that there are no ecological limits for the economy to reckon with.
When Labour announce tomorrow that they are going ahead with building a new generation of nuclear power plants, and start bribing local communities to mortgage their futures by taking in huge tranches of waste, they will not only be creating a dangerous legacy, but doing it in the name of stopping dangerous climate change - which nuclear, for the reasons outlined here, cannot do. Why?
The source of their decision, and the underlying problem, is that ‘mainstream' politics in this country is wedded to the neo-liberal paradigm of political economy. ‘Environmentalism' can be bolted onto this paradigm, but won't transform it. For a true transformation, we would need ‘ecologism': a full-scale, holistic reassessment of our way of life.
Environmentalism tries to protect the environment within the constraints of a system which despoils it. Ecologism plans holistically and long-term from the beginning to avoid such despoliation. Looking for a ‘big-science' technological solution to the problem of climate change (of which nuclear is a classic example) is potentially compatible with environmentalism, but not with ecologism. Thus the receptiveness of government ears to the siren song of the nuclearites - while pitifully small grants for renewable energy projects run out hours after they are launched.
Most of the negative effects of nuclear power will come in the dreadful and virtually-interminable legacy we risk leaving behind us of nuclear waste, and the waste of money and energy and lives that it will create. Our short-termist political system is ill-suited to the prevention of such waste. To become truly long-termist, genuinely sustainable, and furthermore ecological, our political system would require huge changes: beginning with the creation of democratic mechanisms to include the interests and needs of the untold generations of human beings who are as yet unborn.
