Thursday, 24 October 2019
Labour's 'nuclear is renewable' claim is an insult to dead uranium miners
In a 'boiler room' coup Labour seems to be secretly plotting to re-launch the new nuclear build programme by renaming nuclear power as 'renewable'. Their 'expert report' argues that the current level of nuclear generation needs to be maintained, which means building more nuclear power on top of Hinkley Point C. But they seriously expect nobody to notice this because they are calling the new nuclear renewable.
In fact even the report recognises that more nuclear power is not needed to meet Labour's decarbonisation targets. But what it does not stress enough is just how costly the new nuclear commitment will be, and swallows whole the nuclear industry's claim that the next nuclear power station will be cheap. In fact the report backs the Government's 'blank cheque' approach to nuclear funding in that the state will pay all the bills, whatever they are, and make it very difficult for anybody to do a comparison with renewable energy - because renewables would look much, much cheaper.
The biggest cheek of the report is to say 'For the purposes of this analysis, we have considered nuclear power as a contributing towards renewable and low-carbon energy supply' (Section 4.13) https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/ThirtyBy2030report.pdf
Nuclear power cannot be considered renewable. These power plant will be fuelled by a non-renewable energy source, uranium. Apart from anything else uranium mining is associated with very high levels of lung cancer among its workers. That is according to research carried out by a section of the US Health Service dealing with occupational helath and safety . See
https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/pgms/worknotify/uranium.html
In their studies, amongst the increased levels of death, around 400 out of around 4000 miners studied dies from lung cancer - whereas the normalised rate for the study should have been several times less than this - less than 100. Various other diseases were found to be at much higher than expected levels. Altogether the study found that amongst the miners 1595 had died compared to an expected number of 986 deaths.
It really is an insult to these people and their families that they are being airbrushed from reality through the fake argument that nuclear power is 'renewable.
And of course all the reactors planned for the UK are URANIUM reactors.
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