27 March 2008 - Nuclear power has topped the agenda during French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s state visit to Britain, and Gordon Brown has called for a massive expansion of the UK’s nuclear power industry. Dr Caroline Lucas, Green MEP for the South East, responded:

"The government’s call for a renewal and vast expansion of the British nuclear program is far removed from reality. There is absolutely no industrial infrastructure left in the country to build the main components for nuclear plants.

“The UK is already burdened with a hefty bill approaching £73 billion to manage past and current nuclear waste. The financing scheme has entirely fallen apart since the facilities that were supposed to generate income don’t work (in particular the reprocessing plant THORP and the plutonium fuel plant SMP at Sellafield).

She continued: “The French nuclear ‘partners’ are doing hardly better. After two and a half years of construction, their flagship new build project, the European Pressurized Water Reactor (third generation) at Olkiluoto in Finland, is over two years behind schedule and 50% or €1.5 billion over budget.

“The Finnish project manager declared at the end of February 2008 that AREVA had still submitted only half of the plans to them. ‘Nuclear reactors are not built without plans, at least not in Finland.’ he stated.

“A fabrication capacity bottleneck, a shortage of a skilled workforce, repeated delays and excessive cost overruns characterise the current situation of the international nuclear industry. And the situation in the UK is even worse than in other nuclear countries. The plans announced by the British government show a remarkable lack of sense of reality.

“The suggestion that nuclear energy is a solution to dwindling gas and other carbon-based reserves is therefore clearly ill-judged. Investing the same money into efficiency and renewable sources would be cleaner, more efficient and create more jobs."

ENDS