On the 66th anniversary of the worst nuclear accident in the UK – the Windscale Fire – the George Monbiot Nukiller Greenwash Award has been given to Labour’s Keir Starmer.  Nuclear waste continues to arrive in West Cumbria piling up at the site formerly known as Windscale and renamed in 1981 as Sellafield (the Norse name of the large hamlet which was a collection of farms at the confluence of the Rivers Ehen and Calder) taken over by the nuclear sprawl) to try and magic away the bad public image of a dangerous industry – an industry that knows the magic power of words and now calls itself “clean.”

PRESS RELEASE

Labour’s Keir Starmer and West Cumbrian Labour hopeful Josh MacAlister Win the 2023 George Monbiot Nukiller Greenwash award.

To mark the 66th anniversary of the Windscale Fire -the worst nuclear accident in the UK (October 10th 1957) the Close Capenhurst Campaign and Lakes Against Nuclear Dump present the George Monbiot Nukiller Greenwash Award to Labour Leader Keir Starmer and Labour’s Workington and Whitehaven candidate Josh MacAlister. Originally called Windscale, the nuclear site was renamed as Sellafield by British Nuclear Fuels Ltd in 1981 in an attempt to distance the nuclear site from the fallout.  

Both Keir Starmer and Josh MacAlister are out competing the Conservatives in their fizzingly enthusiastic push for dangerous new nuclear. Starmer has accused the Conservatives of a “shambolic” failure to open any nuclear power plants during 13 years in power and has described uranium fuelled nuclear reactors as “homegrown” saying : “The British people should be benefitting from our country’s natural resources, but the Tories’ woeful record is holding us all back.”

Contrary to Starmer’s claims there is no “homegrown” nuclear fuel being mined in the UK with uranium mining being blocked in the 80s in Scotland following a campaign to stop Margaret Thatcher’s plan for uranium mining on Orkney.

Today the Conservative and Labour infatuation with new nuclear is fuelling the demand for polluting new uranium mines in the lands of indigenous people such as the Sami in Sweden.

Josh MacAlister, the Labour hopeful in the next General Election for Workington & Whitehaven has launched a campaign – ””which he hopes will be cross-party” – for ‘New Nuclear Now’.

The area MacAlister is promoting for new nuclear build is the floodplain of the River Ehen known as “Moorside” adjacent to Sellafield.

What’s in a Name? Windscale, Sellafield, “Clean”?? 

Campaigners point out that waste continues to arrive at Sellafield every week from existing nuclear reactors and the more nuclear wastes that arrive the more the likelihood of another nuclear catastrophe in West Cumbria. The official outline emergency planning zone of a catastrophe at Sellafield is up to 50km but the impacts of a disaster would be felt in a far wider area.

Campaigners ask “have the main two parties learnt nothing from the Windscale accident? Nuclear has corrupted the word “clean” and is using it to promote the most dangerous industry in an area still impacted by the Windscale Fire.

Campaigners urge people to join the hundreds who have already signed their petition to Government calling for Government and industry to drop the word “clean” from descriptions of uranium fuelled nuclear power. https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/643217 

George Monbiot  

The award is named after George Monbiot, who very mistakenly believes that Nuclear power is the solution to the Global climate change crisis. Yet the Mining, Transporting, and processing of Uranium uses vast amounts of fossil fuel as does the use of eyewatering amounts of concrete and high tensile steel used in the building of nuclear reactors.

This is before all of the fossil fuel used in processing or storing all of the highly radioactive waste after these reactors have been supposedly ‘decommissioned’.

The first George Monbiot Nukiller Greenwash Award was awarded in 2021 to Springfields Nuclear Fuel Manufacturing plant operated by Westinghouse is at the beginning of the process which has led to nuclear accidents and routine emissions of radionuclides such as radioactive carbon, cesium, strontium and host of other damaging radionuclides. Incredibly Springfields has rebranded itself as a “Clean Energy Technology Park.”

The nuclear industry and Government are promoting the most dangerous energy as “clean” and “renewable,” George Monbiot has played a key part in facilitating this dangerous rebrand.  

About the Award  

The award itself is a tarnished gold coloured cup, made in low quality plastic, symbolising the ecologically damaging nature of the nukiller industry. The cup is awarded in order to highlight the irreparable damage the industry and its cheerleaders are doing to the environment and to public health.

Nuclear sacrifice zones are increasingly a consequence of nuclear power as are the increasing number of people suffering from radiation linked diseases for which the industry has a Compensation scheme for its workforce.

No such scheme exists for members of the public impacted by accidents such as the Windscale Fire, fueled by nuclear fuel made at Springfields. The cup itself will held in safe keeping by the two campaigns in a bid to protect it from radioactive damage by the award winners.