Greenpeace Blog

"We have made the decision to continue with nuclear power."

With those ten words, Gordon Brown managed to break the law, sabotage an ongoing public consultation and do a U-turn on his promise to listen to the people - all during his first Prime Minister's Question Time.

As head of government, Brown's meant to be abiding by a high court ruling that says the government can't legally make a decision on whether to build new nuclear power stations before a proper public consultation has been carried out.

The last consultation, said Justice Sullivan, was "seriously flawed"; the process was "manifestly inadequate and unfair" because insufficient information had been made available by the government for consultees to make an "intelligent response".

It now looks like this consultation is as much of a sham as the last one; the government seems to have already made up its mind on nukes, before the consultation's even really underway.

Here's a pdf of the letter our lawyers sent Brown this morning.

We've been arguing for a long time that nuclear power can't stop climate change - because replacing our whole fleet of nuclear power stations would only reduce our carbon emissions by four per cent, some time after 2024 (far too little, far too late).

The Oxford Research Group has just published an interesting study on the subject. It says that, for nuclear power to make any significant contribution to a reduction in global carbon emissions in the next two generations, the industry would have to construct nearly 3,000 new reactors globally - about one a week for 60 years.

With Blair's recent departure, recollections of 1997 in the media have been dominated by two things: his ascension to power and the Spice Girls. On the other side of the world in China, that same year was important for a couple of other reasons. Most famously, the lease ran out on a small but strategic piece of land called Hong Kong and the British Empire lost one of its last outposts as ownership return to the People's Republic of China.

But on that same piece of land, about the same time Chris Patten was bidding a teary farewell, something else significant happened (at least, we like to think it was) - Greenpeace China opened its doors. The importance of this particular office to the organisation can't be underestimated and, as this video shows, many of our campaigns can't help but take China's astonishing economic and social development into account. And with China now possibly the world's biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, the next ten years are going to be even busier over there.