THE Keir Starmer Labour government won’t scrap the two-child benefit cap because, it claims, the country can’t afford it. Doing away with this punitive measure would lift close to half a million children out of poverty at an estimated cost of £3.6 billion a year.
 
On the other hand, the Starmer government is perfectly happy to scrap the winter fuel allowance for pensioners, because doing so saves money — an estimated £1.4bn this financial year. That potentially life-saving support will now be stripped from as many as 10 million eligible pensioners.
 
That’s £5bn saved, on the backs of children and the elderly, two of the most vulnerable segments of our society.
 
Instead, the Labour government has now announced it will assign almost this identical sum — as much as £5.5bn in life support — to the planned 3,200 megawatt (MW) two-reactor Sizewell C nuclear power plant project on the Suffolk coast.
 
Apparently, it’s perfectly fine to let children go hungry while pensioners shiver in the dark in exchange for an entirely futile energy project that will keep no-one warm anytime soon, if at all.
 
Reacting to the announcement, Pete Wilkinson, spokesperson for Together Against Sizewell C, a local opposition group, observed: “It’s staggering that Labour has increased the potential outlay on this white elephant project to £8bn just days after Labour claimed the country couldn’t afford winter fuel payments for millions of pensioners.”
 
This would be the second government subsidy the scheme has received on top of an earlier £2.5bn handed out by the previous Tory government.
 
The announcement was made on August 30 by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, which described it as “a new subsidy scheme — the Sizewell C Devex Scheme — to enable continued support to the development of the proposed new nuclear power plant Sizewell C (SZC) to the point of a Final Investment Decision (FID) and thereby ultimately reach operation.”
 
The word “ultimately” is key here, since that operational date is very uncertain. Realistically, Sizewell C will never be completed in time to address the climate crisis. The project was initiated in 2010 with the contract awarded to French government corporation, EDF, in 2012.

Fourteen years later, the estimated cost at completion is £20bn, although these calculations are typically unpredictable and underestimated and could soar as high as £30-£40bn. Meanwhile, there are no reactors under construction.
 
Shovels are in the ground, but only to raze forests and fragile habitats adjacent to the precious Minsmere Nature Reserve. This is being done to make way for non-nuclear construction projects including “new offices, and training facilities,” according to Sizewell C’s joint managing directors Julia Pyke and Nigel Cann.
 
Further compounding the risks at Sizewell — in addition to the unsolved dangers of radioactive waste storage and meltdowns — the site sits on the shores of the North Sea where erosion has already taken its toll. With climate change precipitating sea-level rise, the plant will become ever more vulnerable to severe flooding and violent storms by the time it becomes operational.
 
All of this ignores the warnings of climate experts that we now have a window of five years or less in which to take urgent action to reduce carbon emissions to net zero.
 
Despite this, the Labour government continues to support another nuclear debacle, EDF’s first two-reactor project, the 3,200 MW Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant in Somerset.
 
Conceived in 2010 in the waning days of the Tony Blair Labour government, it was then ardently embraced by Conservative prime minister, David Cameron, and his Tory successors. Six years into actual construction, Hinkley Point C remains unfinished while its costs have ballooned to at least £34 billion. EDF’s vague completion date is now “after 2029.”
 
Claims that small modular reactors (SMR) are a promising alternative and can be rolled off assembly lines to answer energy needs are just more pie in the sky. That’s because the hundreds if not thousands of SMRs needed would result in such poor economies of scale it will send electricity prices even higher to compensate for the up-front costs.
 
SMR designs remain on paper, there is scant interest from buyers, and the flagship SMR project in the US, NuScale, has already collapsed under the weight of its exorbitant finances, which proved unacceptable to investors, many of whom dropped out.
 
Furthermore, squandering money on new nuclear power plants that are unlikely to materialise on time if ever, diverts much-needed resources away from the technologies that could be deployed quickly and on a significant scale, such as solar and wind power. For every pound squandered on nuclear power, more carbon reductions could be achieved faster by spending it on renewable energy instead.
 
All of this, however, falls on deaf ears in Westminster. “Labour complained about a black hole in the country’s finances yet now they are proposing to dig still further,” observed Alison Downes of Stop Sizewell C. “Where would this cash come from?”
 
Certainly not from the military, another nuclear hog at the subsidy trough that Labour is more than happy to overfeed. As Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader and independent MP for Islington North remarked: “If the country’s finances are so bad, then why are we still spending £50bn a year on the military? If there’s no money left, why are we spending £12,000 a minute on nuclear weapons?”
 
Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland. She is the independent specialist at Beyond Nuclear (www.beyondnuclear.org).