Jonathan Porritt on Tony Blair

Earlier in the week, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change brought out a new report grandiloquently titled: “Revitalising Nuclear: The UK Can Power AI And Leave The Clean Energy Transition”. In essence, it’s little more than a re-run of today’s standard nuclear propaganda – plus two things: First, a highly flaky retrospective looking back to 1986 to calculate what would have happened to the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions if anti-nuclear campaigners’ “inaccurate post-Chernobyl narrative” hadn’t reduced us to a nation of nuclear sceptics; second, an even more flaky look ahead to the ‘new nuclear age’ that is now so desperately needed to provide the electricity to “power AI”. It’s total tosh – and, as such, I really do urge you to read it! For me, however, reading it was a weird experience, transporting me back 20 years to Tony Blair’s premiership and his evangelical conversion to the cause of nuclear energy in 2005. Before that, he’d more or less gone along with his own Government’s Energy White Paper of 2003, which was distinctly nuclear-sceptic – interpreted widely at the time as “kicking nuclear into the long grass”. Say, Sizewell C comes online in 2037, with a projected lifetime of 60 years – as with Sizewell B – through to 2097. Set that against the latest projections from the (super-conservative) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that we should be anticipating a minimum of a one metre sea level rise by 2100. And then try and imagine the scale of sea defences that will be required to ‘defend’ Sizewell C through to the end of the century from at least a metre higher sea levels, plus storm surges and so on – let alone to whatever time will be required to store the nuclear waste arising from its operations. A ‘material risk’? I think so.