Gordon Brown To Push Ahead With Nuke Plans

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is pushing ahead with plans that lay the groundwork for new nuclear power plants in Briton, despite the Luddite opposition. (The role of Ned Ludd will be played by Greenpeace.)

Gordon Brown appears determined to press ahead with a legal framework for new nuclear power stations in Tuesday’s Queen’s Speech without waiting for the outcome of an official complaint that could derail the whole process.

The complaint concerns a consultation designed to gauge public opinion on nuclear energy, conducted by Opinion Leader Research, a polling company with close links to Labour.

Greenpeace, the environmental campaigning group, has lodged a complaint about alleged bias in the OLR public consultation. The Market Research Standards Council told the FT it was unlikely to decide whether to launch a formal investigation into the complaint until the new year.

But ministers will not wait for the council’s decision before issuing the energy bill, the government has signalled.

Officials told the FT that, should the government decide to go ahead with replacing Britain’s ageing nuclear power stations, there was no reason the bill – expected by the end of the year – should be delayed until after the ruling.

Greenpeace has already legally challenged the government over its perceived pro-nuclear bias, winning a High Court ruling in February that an earlier consultation was “manifestly inadequate and unfair”. The pressure group’s lawyers are now considering whether to issue another legal challenge while waiting for the MRSC ruling.

The fact is - regardless of what the anti-capitalists preach - that access to energy has lifted billions of people out of bleak, subsistence existences in the past century. The current scare tactic of some very mendacious people is that man is causing climate change, therefore the burning of fossil fuels must be stopped. I happen to agree that burning fossil fuels is not a great idea - mostly because fossil fuel is more valuable for other purposes. But the ugly facts of physics make it impossible to rely on the "renewable" energy schemes being pushed. So if carbon is off the table and renewables won't work (and cannot be made to work, regardless of all the wishful thinking) then there is only one thing left right now. That is nuclear power. It seems that Brown realizes that even if Ned Ludd does not.