Nuclear power? No point, says Green candidate

Speaking in next week’s Big Issue in the North, Green Party MEP candidate Peter Cranie argues that there’s actually no point to nuclear power. He points to clean renewables and modern energy efficiency measures, and explains why Gordon Brown’s nuclear-powered “green new deal” isn’t green and isn’t, in fact, much of a new deal either.

Of course there’s the increasingly-expensive problem of waste; “after half a century we still don’t know what to do with the radioactive waste, which we’ll be dealing with for thousands of years,” says Peter. But rather than risk getting bogged-down in arguments about whether nuclear is safe or not, he simply gets right down to the economics of the matter.

Peter explains: “Nuclear provides about four per cent of our energy. We could save several times that much just by improving energy-efficiency in homes and businesses. Reducing demand would cut people’s fuel bills, and incidentally create tens of thousands of extra jobs”.

The article explains that nuclear energy would not reduce emissions fast enough, but that wind, wave and solar energy would – and would also create new jobs “starting right now,” not in ten or fifteen years’ time after building new nuclear power stations. And, he says, renewables would generate not only clean, safe electricity, but more new jobs than could be created by Gordon Brown’s nuclear dream: “Several times as many jobs per megawatt from clean renewables,” he says.

The Green Party’s 2009 Euro-election manifesto, titled “It’s the economy, stupid,” spells out policies that the Greens say would create over a million UK jobs within 2-3 years, including more than 100,000 in the North West – many of them in the renewable energy and energy-conservation industries.