A front page story in today’s Guardian announces that the UK will consider a carbon tax to increase the price of electricity and make nuclear more cost effective.

As a result Radiation Free Lakeland is urging people to write to Ed Milliband at the Department of Energy and Climate Change to object to “this outrageous and unjust tax favouring the very industry that first blew a hole in the ozone layer.”

Marianne Birkby (pictured) of RFL says: “This amounts to higher tax bills to pay for nuclear. Last year Sellafield quadrupled it emissions of HFC's, thousands of times more potent as a green house gas than CO2.

"The Nuclear Industry has already been given tens of millions  of taxpayers money to 'sweeten' the bitter nuclear pill in Cumbria.  From the Primary Care Trust to Citizens Advice Bureau's  and even heritage centres like the Beacon - all have had monies which should  have come directly from government rather than being filtered through the nuclear industry in order to persuade Cumbria to accept ever more dangerous nuclear developments.”

Latest announcement today is that Nuclear Management Partners are giving £100,000 to stage next year’s Whitehaven Festival.

While all this 'bribery' has been going on the industry has maintained that new build would only happen "if the industry bears the full cost of electricity generation, including the cost of decommissioning and its fair share of the cost of waste disposal."   The industry has never come close to meeting this claim.

Both EdF and Areva have mind boggling debts, estimated at around £35 billion each. Both companies would have be bankrupt if they weren't between 85 and 90% owned by the French government.

Charges for late completion of the reactor at Olkiluoto, in Finland, will add to Areva's debt burden.

The experience of nuclear countries is that nuclear power does not stop the need for electricity from fossil fuels and it replaces renewables, not coal, in the energy mix.

In fact the evidence shows that to go nuclear is to increase use of fossil fuel. 

According to Nuclear Engineering International Nuclear France  uses more fossil fuel per capita than the rest of Europe.

Pete Rowberry from Communities Against Nuclear Expansion has challenged the government - "Will this change of policy be subject to any democratic scrutiny? I doubt it. I challenge the government to move away from its obsession with nuclear power and to debate sustainable solutions to meet the country's energy needs.

“There is an alternative, based upon efficient local generation and a modern distribution grid to support smaller scale local producers and tidal and waste to energy schemes".

http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/contact_us/contact_us.aspx

See the Guardian front page article
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/oct/19/nuclear-tax-on-power-bills

Nuclear France uses more oil per capita than the rest of Europe
http://www.neimagazine.com/story.asp?storyCode=2053958

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