nuclear-news

UK’s new government taxonomy will greenwash nuclear

It would be easy to miss the oblique reference buried in the document where it states that ‘the government proposes that nuclear energy will be classified as green in any future UK Green Taxonomy’. This proposal will be the subject of a further consultation.

Treasury officials and ministers are looking to officially rebrand nuclear power as ‘green energy’ in their latest taxonomy plan; a move the NFLAs will continue to expose and oppose.

Mirroring moves first made by the European Commission, and mooted by the previous Conservative Government, a consultation has now concluded on whether Ministers should establish a new ‘UK Green Taxonomy’ which is described as a ‘useful tool’ in the UK’s ambition ‘to be the world leader in sustainable finance’.

The consultation document describes a taxonomy as ‘a classification tool which provides its users with a common framework to define which economic activities support climate, environmental or wider sustainability objectives’. In essence, it is a mechanism to judge whether an investment is deemed to be ‘green’; if in the case of energy, the technology is judged ‘green’ financial bodies will be better able to justify investing in it to their share- or bondholders.

It would be easy to miss the oblique reference buried in the document where it states that ‘the government proposes that nuclear energy will be classified as green in any future UK Green Taxonomy’. This proposal will be the subject of a further consultation.

Two years ago, we set out in a letter to then Conservative Chancellor Jeremy Hunt in response to his plans to introduce a similar taxonomy a list ‘of the carbon-intensive and environmentally damaging activities that accompany civil nuclear power projects’:

• the mining of uranium and its processing and manufacture into fuel rods which leaves ‘behind environmental degradation, radioactive contamination, and chronic ill-health from exposure to that radiation amongst the local workforce and the host community (usually poor and Indigenous)’
• the construction of a nuclear power plant which ‘requires the employment of vast amounts of concrete, steel and numerous other materials, many years of labour, and many millions of vehicles and personnel movements onto and off site’
• the operation of a nuclear power station necessitating ‘the transportation of fuel rods, waste, other materials and the labour force onto and off the site; the daily use of millions of gallons of seawater with the deaths of millions of fish; and the employment of its own generated electricity for cooling the plant and any stockpiled radioactive waste’
• ongoing nuclear operations which lead to ‘the contamination of the environment surrounding the plant, local beaches, the sea, neighbouring water courses and air’

And, above all, after the closure of the nuclear power station, the need to engage in the costly and prolonged decommissioning of the plant, the decontamination of the site, and the management and treatment of the radioactive waste involves processes that are ‘incredibly resource intensive.’

Green, we don’t think so.

February 11, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | spinbuster, UK