UK will let children starve and the elderly freeze but will happily overfeed the nuclear hogs, writes Linda Pentz Gunter
The United Kingdom’s Labour government won’t scrap the two-child benefit cap because, they claim, the country can’t afford it. Doing away with this punitive measure would lift close to half a million children out of poverty at an estimated cost of $4.7 billion a year. The cap prevents parents from claiming child tax credit or universal credit for more than two children. It was introduced by the Conservative Government in 2017.
On the other hand, the UK government is perfectly happy to scrap the winter fuel allowance for pensioners, because doing so saves money — an estimated $1.8 billion this financial year. That potentially life-saving support will now be stripped from as many as 10 million eligible senior citizens.
That’s $6.5 billion saved, on the backs of children and the elderly, two of the most vulnerable segments of society.
Instead, the Labour government has now announced it will assign even more than this amount — as much as $7.2 billion in life support — to the planned 3,200 megawatt (MW) two-reactor Sizewell C nuclear power plant project on the Suffolk coast.
The Sizewell nuclear power plant, where two new EPR reactors are planned. Under worsening climate change conditions, reactors on the beach are a dangerous venture. (Photo: nick macneill/Wikimedia Commons)
Apparently, it’s perfectly fine to let children go hungry while pensioners shiver in the dark in exchange for an entirely futile energy project that will keep no one warm anytime soon if at all.
Reacting to the announcement, Pete Wilkinson, spokesperson for Together Against Sizewell C, a local opposition group, observed: “It’s staggering that Labour have increased the potential outlay on this white elephant project to £8 billion ($10.5 billion) just days after Labour claimed the country couldn’t afford winter fuel payments for millions of pensioners.”
This would be the second government subsidy the scheme has received on top of an earlier $3.2 billion handed out by the previous Tory government.
The announcement was made on August 30 by the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero, which described it as “a new subsidy scheme – the Sizewell C Devex Scheme – to enable continued support to the development of the proposed new nuclear power plant Sizewell C (SZC) to the point of a Final Investment Decision (FID) and thereby ultimately reach operation.”
The word “ultimately” is key here, since that operational date is very uncertain. Realistically, Sizewell C will never be completed in time to address the climate crisis. More probably, it won’t be completed at all. The project was initiated in 2010 with the contract awarded to French government corporation, EDF, in 2012. Fourteen years later, the estimated cost at completion is over $26 billion, although these calculations are typically unpredictable and underestimated and could soar as high as $40-$53 billion. Meanwhile, there are no reactors under construction.
Shovels are in the ground, but only to raze forests and fragile habitat adjacent to the precious Minsmere Nature Reserve, operated by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. This is being done to make way for non-nuclear construction projects including “new offices, and training facilities,” according to Sizewell C’s joint managing directors Julia Pyke and Nigel Cann.
Further compounding the risks at Sizewell — in addition to the unsolved dangers of radioactive waste storage and meltdowns — the site sits on the shores of the North Sea where erosion has already taken its toll. With climate change precipitating sea-level rise, the plant will become ever more vulnerable to severe flooding and violent storms by the time it becomes operational.
All of this ignores the warnings of climate experts that we now have a window of five years or less in which to take urgent action to reduce carbon emissions to net zero.
Despite this, the Labour government continues to support another nuclear debacle, EDF’s first two-reactor project, the 3,200 MW Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant in Somerset.
Conceived in 2010 in the waning days of the Tony Blair Labour government, it was then ardently embraced by Conservative prime minister, David Cameron, and his Tory successors. Six years into actual construction, Hinkley Point C remains unfinished while its costs have ballooned to at least $45 billion. EDF’s vague completion date is now “after 2029”.
Hinkley Point C is still incomplete, with costs ballooning to at least $45 billion, but no lessons have been learned. (Photo: Nick Chipchase/Wikimedia Commons)
Claims that small modular reactors (SMR) are a promising alternative and can be rolled off assembly lines to answer energy needs, are just more pie in the sky. That’s because the hundreds if not thousands of SMRs needed would result in such poor economies of scale it will send electricity prices even higher to compensate for the upfront costs. Rolls Royce is leading the SMR charge in the UK, but its small reactors aren’t even small — coming in at 450MW.
The UK appears to have closed its eyes to the sharp reality check delivered to SMR fantasists in the US after that country’s flagship SMR project, NuScale, collapsed under the weight of its exorbitant finances, which proved unacceptable to investors, many of whom dropped out.
Furthermore, squandering money on new nuclear power plants that are unlikely to materialize on time if ever, diverts much-needed resources away from the technologies that could be deployed quickly and on a significant scale, such as solar and wind power. For every pound wasted on nuclear power, more carbon reductions could be achieved faster by spending it on renewable energy instead.
All of this, however, falls on deaf ears in Westminster. “Labour complained about a black hole in the country’s finances yet now they are proposing to dig still further,” observed Alison Downes of Stop Sizewell C. “Where would this cash come from?”
Certainly not from the military, another nuclear hog at the subsidy trough that Labour is more than happy to overfeed. As Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader and independent MP for Islington North remarked: “If the country’s finances are so bad, then why are we still spending £50 billion ($66 billion) a year on the military? If there’s no money left, why are we spending £12,000 ($16,000) a minute on nuclear weapons?”
