Nuclear power is never the answer

Scottish Labour’s Jack Mcconnell took a stand against nuclear – his party should not go back on that, says Dr Richard Dixon

Calls for new nuclear power are rearing their ugly head again – including from Scottish Labour, which blocked nuclear in Scotland 16 years ago. Nuclear is slow to build, eyewateringly expensive and dangerous. There is still no agreed solution for nuclear waste, which will need monitoring for many thousands of years. It is not a solution to short-term energy needs nor to the climate crisis.

The UK Conservative Party conference was spooked by the looming energy crisis. The Times published a story on the eve of the event saying the Prime Minister was going to pledge that all our electricity would come from renewables by 2035.

But Boris Johnson didn’t actually say this in his – and it later became clear the commitment was for nuclear and renewables. A boost in renewables is very welcome, but more focus on nuclear is a huge mistake, and will actually slow down the transition to renewables.

The UK Labour Party conference was equally depressing on this front. A preview of what might be to come was when Brian Wilson, former Ayrshire MP and ex-uk energy minister, was announced as the chairman of the Scottish Energy Transition Commission.

The commission itself – Scottish Labour’s plan to keep the pressure up on the Scottish Government’s Just Transition Commission – should be welcome, but giving it to the former “Minister for Hunterston Nuclear Power Station” will immediately devalue it.

But worse came when Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar was quoted saying he supports a “diverse energy supply” – the standard code for “more nuclear” – and thinks “nuclear is a key part of that and it’s something that I think we should fundamentally explore”.

For many years the Scottish Conservative manifesto for every election said we should have two new nuclear power stations in Scotland. It became a running joke because they knew it was never going to happen, and they quietly dropped any mention of nuclear a couple of elections ago.

The tragedy of Labour finding a new enthusiasm for the ultimate unsustainable form of energy is that it was a Labour First Minister who put a stop to the nuclear industry’s ambitions in Scotland. Jack Mcconnell – despite massive pressure from Tony Blair’s government, – said in 2005 that Scotland would use planning powers to block any proposals for new reactors in this country unless there was an answer to the question of permanent storage of radioactive

Scottish Labour’s drift into being pro-nuclear... is a betrayal of one of their greatest achievements

waste – something that is no closer today than it was then.

Had Mcconnell not taken that stance Scotland could have had its own farce like that of the attempts to build new reactors at Hinkley Point in Somerset, now promised to be running in 2027 – a decade after the original planned opening date, at an ever-rising cost currently running at £23 billion, which is more than ten times what Tony Blair told us nuclear stations would cost. Instead we have got on with a massive expansion of renewable energy.

Scottish Labour’s drift into being pro-nuclear will please no-one but the GMB trade union and Wilson. It is a betrayal of one of their greatest achievements in government.

Dr Richard Dixon is director of Friends of the Earth Scotland