Vampire Economics

Scotland is to be landed with costs because the British elite are ruled by big business interests. After years of "consultation" Labour has decided that its to go Nuclear. Big fucking surprise. This is the culmination of the biggest PR and lobbying exercise in years.

As Patrick Harvie of the Greens said: "This is vampire economics, using massive infusions of taxpayers' money to try and bring the nuclear industry back to life. Labour have decided that we should pay the industry's decommissioning costs, plus the costs of setting up waste storage facilities, and, staggeringly, an extra fee per unit of electricity we use. All this on top of the £70bn of waste we have already been left to deal with from existing plants."

Scotland needs only about 80 per cent of the electricity produced north of the Border for its own consumption and exports about 20 per cent to England. Yet we'll be subsidising the English decommissioning costs for decades.

The New Economics Foundation accused the government of "fixing the market". Its policy director Andrew Simms said: "Nuclear power will not survive on its own in the market place. The government will have to use voodoo economics to underwrite capacity.The only beneficiaries are the big energy companies.".

Alex Salmond also claimed Scotland would become a big net exporter of electricity to Europe in the medium to long term. "Far from there being an energy gap in Scotland, there is a strong indication that, within a generation, we will be producing four, five or six times our required electricity in Scotland, and the key issue is finding a way of exporting that power to the energy-poor regions of Europe," he said.

The decision is a massive victory for the right wing lobbyists - like Bernard Ingham and Brian Wilson who have taken huge advances in the private setor and funded anti-renewable propaganda for years.

A spokesman for Greenpeace said last night:

"The government's nuclear policy looks like a dog's breakfast. Ministers are proposing to store highly radioactive waste in the ground, but the only area so far mooted is Cumbria, which the government's own advisers have already ruled out on safety grounds. You have to wonder what on Earth is going on in Whitehall."

Spinwatch has a great story BNFL Covertly Changes the Curriculum: "As the British Government announces the go-ahead for a new generation of nuclear power plants in the UK, Nuclear Spin reveals the pro-nuclear covert campaign underway in British schools.

For example, in 2006, the national curriculum was changed so that it became compulsory for schools to teach all 14-16 year olds about nuclear power. The move was largely sparked by a report for the Department for Trade and Industry written by the Nuclear Skills Group, made up of Government officials and a panel of six ‘independent members’.

In the report only one, Paul Thomas, was said to be working for BNFL. But NuclearSpin has discovered that two more members were also working for BNFL.

One of the nuclear industry’s largest education projects is called Energy Foresight, run by Young Foresight, which in turn has been paid hundreds of thousands of pounds by nuclear organisations to develop a set of teaching materials “that present radioactivity and related issues in personal and social contexts.”