IN POLITICS we invariably have to fight the same old battles over and over again.  

So, to hear the Chancellor in his spring Budget declaring that “increasing nuclear capacity is vital to meet our net zero obligations” should not come as a complete surprise.

After all, this is word for word what the resurgent nuclear lobby has been spinning for some time.

Reclassifying nuclear as “environmentally sustainable” would be risible if it weren’t so dangerous. It is a sordid calculation to tempt us with a top-down technical solution to the crisis of soaring energy prices, a global climate emergency and the long-running absence of any government energy plan. 

The problem is, it is a technical solution built on a moral deception. It is built on a lie. This is the same old nuclear wolf this time in greenwashed sheep’s clothing.

Nuclear is significantly more carbon intensive than renewables.

Nuclear is significantly more capital intensive than renewables: from building and operating to decommissioning.

Nuclear is significantly more harmful to human health, corrosive of democracy, an open society and civil liberties and dangerous to the environment, than renewables.

It contributes to nuclear weapons technologies and stockpiles hazardous waste for which there is no safe, costed, long-term solution.

When something goes wrong with nuclear, it goes very wrong. Look at the impact of nuclear meltdowns at Three Mile Island, Saint Laurent, Chernobyl and Fukushima. 

And look at the real and present danger created by the attacks on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in Ukraine.

That’s why there can be no room for compromise.

At Flamanville in Normandy, a European pressurised water reactor was supposed to be operational in 2012 with a price tag of €3.3 billion.

It will not be up and running until later this year, at an expected cost of €19bn: so, five-and-a-half times over the original budget and 11 years late.

At Hinkley Point, Britain’s first nuclear plant in decades, the earliest start date is now forecast as 2027, that’s 10 years later than originally expected. The costs have already soared by 40 per cent to £25bn.

In Finland, Olkiluoto is 13 years late and the proposed new plant on the Hanhikivi peninsula has been abandoned.  

The only two European pressurised reactors in operation are in Taishan, China. One was shut down in 2021, the other is running at severely reduced capacity. 

And all the time the nuclear industry is underwritten by heavy public subsidy. Under the new regulated asset base financing model created by the 2022 Nuclear Energy Financing Act, any future nuclear projects will lead to British energy users paying up front for cost overruns through hefty increases in bills. So, the risk transfers from the nuclear corporations to the people. 

In the US this same system has meant that consumers are paying for years for reactors never even completed nor started up.

We hear, even in our own movement, nuclear propagandists profess that the industry is transformed and cleaned up. 

So last year I inquired about the number of reported incidents which occurred at Scotland’s two remaining operational nuclear power stations over the last decade: from 2012 to 2022.

According to the Office for Nuclear Regulation, at Hunterston B there were exactly 100 incidents, at Torness there were as many as 177. 

Incidents are defined as a “near miss, for example an initiating event or fault condition, that has the potential to cause an accident.”

This is not a reflection on the workforce, but on the system they are working within.

Now we are being told that the future of nuclear power does not purely rest in these large-scale reactors, but in small modular reactors (SMRs) relying on fusion rather than fission technology.

Rather bafflingly to anyone familiar with the past history of nuclear power, all present empirical experience, and the future funding model, the Labour Party’s Energy Bills Plan last year called for a “drive forward” of the development of SMRs, and for Sizewell C to be fast-tracked.

Even the departing SNP First Minister, when pressed, refused to rule out support for small modular nuclear technology.

A pilot project at Ardeer in Ayrshire failed to get UK government backing, but tax exile billionaire Jim Ratcliffe wants one installed at his Ineos plant in Grangemouth, and the operators of the new not-so-green freeport on the Cromarty Firth have stated they want to use the site as a SMR nuclear manufacturing hub.

They should not build their hopes up too high. There will be mass popular resistance. And as Professor Walt Paterson told me recently, they’ve been trying to get fusion technology to work since the 1950s. It consumes more energy than it generates.

We do need a transformative approach to energy. Time is running out. But that does not mean turning the clock back to the atomic age.

It demands that we look forward to better investment in renewables, creating useful work in energy efficiency, and upgrading electricity networks and storage capacity.

It means we address head on the abject governmental failure to land the renewables jobs bonanza here.

That does require an industrial strategy, an economic plan and democratic public ownership in our energy sector. And of course, it means fighting that same old battle to win a greener, democratic and socialist future.

Richard Leonard is Scottish Labour MSP for Central Scotland (Region) and former leader of the Scottish Labour Party.