The end of nuclear power? Careful what you wish for
Flawed and stalled as the plans for toxic waste may be, at least they exist. There is no way to clean up CO2, the greater evil
‘Abandoning a proven and reliable low-carbon technology as climate breakdown accelerates is a special form of madness.' Illustration: Daniel Pudles
Is this the end? According to the Green MP Caroline Lucas, new nuclear power in this country has been "completely derailed". She may not be wrong. She was talking about the decision by Cumbria county council to reject the nuclear waste dump the government had planned.
But she could just as well have been responding to the new report by a parliamentary committee, or to the declaration of surrender by Centrica: the last British company with a stake in the technology in the country. Put the three of them together and they add weight to the claims of those who maintain that atomic energy is finished in the United Kingdom. As I've spent much of the past two years defending it, this is a hard admission to make.
I don't blame the people of Cumbria for rejecting the dump: the plan was an expensive, erudite and technically advanced dog's breakfast. The location the government had chosen had only one virtue: availability. Or so it thought. The nuclear-friendly county turned out to be no more enthused about mopping up the industry's excretions than the rest of Britain. No dump in Cumbria means no dump anywhere.
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