New Labour’s nuclear nightmare
The New Labour government’s announcement that Britain should build at least six new nuclear power stations is a searing indictment of its impotence in the face of the linked challenges of climate change and energy supply.
Apart from the safety and the profound ecological issues around the disposal of spent fuel, going nuclear is yet another New Labour policy based on market “solutions”. Reactors costing billions to build and maintain will, apparently, result from corporate sector initiatives.
This is pure nonsense, as Jeremy Warner pointed out in the financial pages of The Independent (July 12): “The government seems blithely to assume that the market will somehow provide. One thing is certain when it comes to nuclear is that it will not.” Without long-term contracts that guarantee prices and the rate of return, there will be no plants, Warner added.
In any case, there is only a limited supply of uranium left in the world. So what New Labour proposes will lead to high-cost reactors that would generate power for just a few years whilst building up a lethal legacy of nuclear waste for generations to come.
The reality is that New Labour is bankrupt of ideas and policies precisely because it is committed to capitalist markets and production-for-profit imperatives. Every policy pronouncement on health, education, transport, housing and welfare is shot through with imposing privatisation and commercial frameworks.
Energy and climate change are no exceptions to this rule. Whatever happens, Blair and Brown have made clear, nothing must be done to disturb the functioning of the global capitalist economy. That is the nature of the market state they preside over. Nuclear energy is not so much their response to climate change as to the need to expand production and consumption levels.
Yet it is the very nature of corporate-driven globalisation that has produced the nightmare of melting ice caps, millions without fresh water and dwindling energy resources. It is the fact that capitalist firms must increase profits year on year that has resulted in the wilful destruction of natural resources and the rapid growth of CO2 emissions.
Practical answers to the energy/climate crises do exist, however. Organisation such as the New Economics Foundations have shown how a combination of wind, wave and solar power could replace both fossil and nuclear fuel. Scientists are constantly expanding their knowledge of how nature works as the path to new forms of safe energy.
Unfortunately, none of this pioneering work can come to fruition so long as the bottom line comes first. Without a profound reshaping and restructuring of economic activities it is impossible to adopt alternative energy sources and tackle climate change. For example, how can we address global warming so long as car and oil corporations dominate the planet? The answer is self-evident.
The well-meaning environmental movement hopes beyond hope that pressure and protest will force governments to make capitalism change its spots. New Labour’s nuclear plans show how misguided and naïve this approach to be. The market state and corporate greed have between them brought humanity to a point of no return. Nothing less than a transformation of existing economic and political power structures and the creation of truly democratic alternatives can save us from Blair’s nuclear nightmare.
13 July 2006
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