nuclear-news

Why Hinkley is a very risky bet – BBC Radio Wales http://tomburke.co.uk/2016/07/29/why-hinkley-is-a-very-risky-bet-bbc-radio-wales/ Tom Burke,  This is not where we expected to be this morning, and it is very difficult to imagine what the government will discover in a few weeks time that it doesn’t already know. So I think that it is fortunate that this is giving us a chance to look again at what is a very bad deal for Britain, a 37 billion pound punt by the British government with energy bill payer’s money on an unproven technology. It is a 20th century technology that locks us into the wrong kind of infrastructure for the 21st century. It shuts us out from building an energy infrastructure that will be cheaper, faster, cleaner and much more reliably delivered than Hinkley Point……..

I share concerns about the implications, of the extraordinarily casual treatment of a very big project, for employment. It’s not just in the nuclear industry that this government had been careless. We have lost 12,000 jobs in the last couple of years in the solar industry because the government can’t make it mind up about energy policy. We lost even more jobs in the energy efficiency industry again because the government seems to treat energy policy like a political bagatelle, that it can just change in an arbitrary way.

But the risks associated with Hinkley Point are enormous, in terms of what we spend our money on. Actually there are three of these reactors already built. All of them, including the one that is being build in China are years late and billions of pounds over budget. I just think this is too risky a project to go ahead with when there are lots of other things that we could do that are faster, cleaner and cheaper ways to meet our requirements for energy going forward. By the way if we went ahead with this, it wouldn’t help us with the immediate problems we have securing supplies of electricity because this won’t be generating electricity until 2030. http://tomburke.co.uk/2016/07/29/why-hinkley-is-a-very-risky-bet-bbc-radio-wales/