nuclear power

Update: our executive director John Sauven has written on why Gordon Brown's reluctance to embrace the economic and environmental potential of renewable energy technology is costing us time, money and could eventually cost us the climate here.

British prime ministers have a longstanding tradition of taking on the less savoury characteristics of their US counterparts pretty soon after coming to office. For Blair, it was a propensity towards using weapons of mass destruction. For Brown, it's trying to scupper vital climate change deals.

On the same day that scientists have shown that carbon emissions are accumulating far more quickly than predicted, leaked documents reveal that Labour wants to work with the nuclear-obsessed French and the climate-sceptic Polish presidents to undermine a vital European deal on renewable energy. The deal - to generate 20 per cent of energy from renewables by 2020 - was only finalised by European leaders including Tony Blair earlier this year.

Today is the official end of the government's nuclear "consultation" (more on that coming soon). It's also the 50th anniversary of the world's second biggest nuclear disaster - at Windscale, now known as Sellafield, in West Cumbria.

Jean McSorley, a nuclear consultant, has written about the disaster in today's Guardian. It's powerful stuff, so I'm posting an extract here:

"I opened the gag-port and there it was - a fire at the face of the reactor. I thought: 'Oh dear, now we are in a pickle.'" Those were the words of the late Arthur Wilson, the instrument technician who discovered the Windscale fire on October 10 1957, in No 1 of the twin plutonium piles. It signalled the beginning of the world's second biggest nuclear reactor accident.

There's a truly frightening story – and a sharp reminder that its failure to tackle climate change isn’t the only problem with nuclear power - in The Guardian today.

A mafia clan in Italy is accused of trafficking nuclear waste and trying to make plutonium (ie nuclear weapons). It's alleged, says The Guardian, "to have made illegal shipments of radioactive waste to Somalia, as well as seeking the 'clandestine production' of other nuclear material".

Eight former employees of the state energy research agency Enea, suspected of paying the mafia to take the nuclear waste off their hands, are also being investigated.

"An Enea manager is said to have paid the clan to get rid of 600 drums of toxic and radioactive waste from Italy, Switzerland, France, Germany, and the US… with Somalia as the destination lined up by the traffickers… But with only room for 500 drums on a ship waiting at the northern port of Livorno, 100 drums were secretly buried somewhere in the southern Italian region of Basilicata."

The full story's here.