nuclear-news

The ‘Golden Age of nuclear’ deal is all a veneer

2 October 2025, https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/golden-age-nuclear-deal-all-veneer

Once again, working people have been betrayed with false promises about jobs in an industry that is actually making climate change worse, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER

AT THIS point there is no need for any of us who are inclined toward commentary to further point out the utter dereliction of the Keir Starmer government. It is doing a perfectly fine job on its own.

One clear indication of the malaise running rampant through the ranks of Starmer’s seemingly ever-diminishing inner circle, is the craven subservience to war criminals. The British government managed to kowtow to two in the space of one week — first the Israeli President Isaac Herzog, followed by US President Donald Trump.

Upon arrival, Herzog might have heard the distant echo of a door slamming behind the departing deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner. He might also have caught sight of disgraced British ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson, who was summarily sent back to Britain the day after Herzog’s arrival in London.

Now the turmoil has turned to Starmer’s inside — and right-hand — man, Morgan McSweeney, another “we told you so” category of rogue who has been accused of potentially buying Starmer’s party leadership victory.

Amid the general gloating and glee on the right, inevitable and hypocritical albeit self-inflicted by the Starmer team, came this observation by Daily Mail columnist Dan Hodges. “Keir Starmer hoped the stench of sleaze and scandal enveloping his administration would begin to dissipate following the successful state visit of Donald Trump.”

If Starmer truly believed that embracing Trump, the one person whose stench of sleaze and scandal is even more malodorous than his own, was likely to restore confidence in the current Labour government, we are in even bigger trouble than we thought.

And we are. Because far from “successful,” one outcome of Trump’s visit was yet another great betrayal of British working people. This time it came in the form of the “golden age of nuclear” contract struck between the US and British governments. The title alone betrays its false veneer and utter subservience to Trump and his cabal.

On May 23, Trump had proudly announced in an executive order that he was “restoring gold standard science,” although it will come as no surprise that it in fact dismantles anything that smacks of actual science.

Trump is also promoting his “Golden Dome” missile defence system and on the day he unveiled his commitment to “gold standard science” he also “unleashed” (a favourite word) four executive orders trumpeting a nuclear renaissance.

How sad then, that neither Starmer nor energy secretary Ed Miliband can come up with their own language to describe the new nuclear contract. They must, perforce, sing from Trump’s golden hymnbook.

Their plagiarised “golden age” announcement was replete with Trump-style hyper-masculine hyperbole. They boasted of “homegrown energy” and “major new deals that will turbocharge the build-out of new nuclear power stations.”

The deal would drive forward “the government’s energy superpower mission to take back control of Britain’s energy for good.” Working people will be the big winners.

Unfortunately, the track record of nuclear power to date, and the extreme uncertainty surrounding whether any of the companies vying to build new reactors will actually deliver, means that the opposite is true.

Timelines for reactor construction, even for the known, familiar models such as the two being built at Hinkley Point C, for example, are far longer than before. Recently completed new reactors in the US, Finland and France have uniformly run well over budget, sometimes as much as three times over or more.

There will be no jobs in new nuclear power projects for working people anytime soon. When and if jobs do materialise, those suited to working people will likely be temporary, in construction. Many jobs will require highly specialised skills for which working people will not have been trained.

Instead of wasting time and money on new, unproven reactor designs, including so-called small modular reactors, we could achieve greater carbon emissions far faster for the same investment in renewable energy. Therefore, choosing the slow, expensive nuclear path instead of renewables results in more use of fossil fuels in the meantime.

Furthermore, the “golden age” contract lists a whole rogues’ gallery of companies who have already proven to be unreliable at best and certainly devoid of any interest in serving the needs of working people. Indeed, as with all major corporations their sole motive is profit.

Among them are companies such as Holtec, mired in corruption, and TerraPower, owned by billionaire, Bill Gates, who went cap in hand to score a $2 billion subsidy from the US Department of Energy for his $4bn Natrium reactor. British taxpayers can expect to be similarly fleeced.

None of the reactors promoted by the US companies on the list have actually received a licence. They are simply paper reactors.

The notion that somehow this deal will deliver “energy independence” and “homegrown energy” is, to be generous, disingenuous. What’s missing from the conversation is the uranium necessary to make the fuel for these reactors. Unless the Starmer government is plotting to reopen the fight with residents of Orkney, who already beat back efforts in the mid-1970s to mine uranium there, there is nothing “homegrown” about nuclear energy.

Where will that uranium come from? The main uranium exporting countries are Canada, Australia and Kazakhstan. Niger is also high on the list. In almost all cases around the world, uranium is mined on the land of Indigenous peoples who take the full burden of the contamination this causes to their air, water and land, but languish in poverty while the mining companies profit.

When the mines close, the companies leave, abandoning surrounding populations to suffer the often serious and even fatal health consequences resulting for endless exposure to the radioactive waste left behind.

The high-assay low enriched uranium (HALEU) fuel needed for some of the new reactor designs — including the one promoted by Gates — is almost exclusively produced by Russia. Trump has bragged about opening HALEU production facilities in the US, but nothing has happened. Whilst he has deployed an embargo on Russian oil and gas, uranium imports remain exempt.

Perhaps the most alarming aspect of the “golden” nuclear deal is the declared intention to shortcut the regulatory process. Nuclear power plants are inherently dangerous. The new designs have not demonstrated that they have overcome these challenges. Indeed, most if not all of them are new versions of old designs whose predecessors have a record of fires, explosions and meltdowns.

But the British-US contract states it “will make it quicker for companies to build new nuclear power stations in both countries, for example by speeding up the time it takes for a nuclear project to get a licence from roughly three or four years to roughly two.”

Shortcutting safety oversight in any sector is never a good idea. It is particularly reckless when dealing with nuclear power. And it is even more so if Britain is to take the Trump administration on its word that a particular reactor has been deemed safe by the US and therefore requires no safety scrutiny by British regulatory authorities.

That’s because Trump has set about to dismantle the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, ordering the agency to “rubber-stamp” new licence applications and prioritise production over safety. He is picking off anyone within the agency that disagrees and replacing them with “yes-men,” one of whom is the compliant lapdog chair of the NRC, David Wright, a Republican appointee.

Starmer calls the US nuclear partnership a “landmark.” He says it’s about “powering our homes, it’s about powering our economy, our communities, and our ambition.” It’s that last word that contains the only morsel of truth.

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland, where she works as the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear. She is currently covering events in London.

October 3, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | spinbuster, UK | Leave a comment