11th January 2002

The future of Nuclear Power is back on the agenda as the government reconsiders its future in the energy review and the outcome is of great importance for all of us since it is so closely linked to nuclear weapons.

During the war, Harold Nicolson wrote a novel called PUBLIC FACES in which he described the invention of an Atom bomb by Britain so the news of the atomic attack on Hiroshima seemed like a fantasy that had come true, and Group Captain Cheshire who was sent as the cabinet representative in one of the planes which involved in that raid, told a student meeting I attended later, that if we did not get our policy in nuclear weapons right everything we were doing was a complete waste of time.

Then in 1955 President Eisenhower launched the 'Atoms for Peace' programme and many people, including me, saw this as a classic example of 'beating swords into ploughshares' and strongly supported civil nuclear power in Britain, a view I still held when, in 1966 I was appointed Minister of Technology with responsibility for the development of that programme.

I was told, believed and argued publicly that civil nuclear power was cheap, safe and peaceful and it was only later that I learned that this was all untrue since, if the full cost of development and the cost of storing long-term nuclear waste is included in the calculations nuclear power is three times the cost of coal when the pits were being closed on economic grounds.
Nuclear power is certainly not safe as we know from accidents at Windscale (now renamed Sellafield), from Three Mile Island in America and Chernobyl in the Ukraine, dangers which the authorities have always been determined to downplay.

Nor are Britain's civil nuclear power stations peaceful as for many years, and still possibly today, the plutonium they produce was sent to fuel the American nuclear weapons programme, making them into - what were in effect - bomb factories.

At no stage, as a minister, could I rely on being told the truth either by the Industry itself, or by my own civil servants who may or may not have known it themselves.

Some dramatic examples of misinformation which made a deep impression on me converted me from being a supporter to a very strong opponent of the whole nuclear power programme.

Once, in Japan, a Japanese minister asked me how we were getting on with the task of clearing up the fire at Windscale years before, of which I was wholly unaware.

When I raised this with my officials they replied that as it had occurred before I took office they had not wanted to 'bother me' with it, all this at a time when I was arguing that nuclear power was safe.

The same excuse, that it was 'before my time', was offered when I discovered that stolen plutonium had gone to Israel forming the basis of their own atomic weapons programme.

And, most serious of all, I heard from the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Authority, that when in 1957 the Soviet reprocessing plant at Khysthm had a major accident the US Central Intelligence Agency, which had picked this up on their own monitoring system, notified the AEA but had told them not to tell British Ministers in case it shook public confidence in Nuclear power, using that as the reason why I had not been informed.

And it was only after the 1979 election that I heard from a senior scientist in the Generating Board, that while I was actually a minister, and unknown to me, plutonium from our civil nuclear power stations was being sent to America for their own military programme.

Nuclear power is expensive, dangerous and all about the Bomb, using the generation of electricity as a cover to mislead the public so that the arms programme can be munitioned.

The decision to proceed with the MOX fuel plant at Sellafield against the strong opposition of the Irish and Norwegian governments, which fear radioactive discharges, suggests that the prime minister is determined to go ahead with nuclear power, though the German government have decided to decommission 19 nuclear reactors of their own.

And the original plans, in the USA, to build 2000 reactors by the year 2000 were dropped years ago because of public opposition to their construction, and it may well be that is why Britain supplied America with the plutonium which they needed.

One other problem about nuclear power was the secret and unhealthy link between senior British officials and Westinghouse who were busy trying to persuade us to start a massive new power station programme using their own Pressure Water Reactor, which I had been advised had potential safety problems.

Throughout this long saga I came to know, trust and work with Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and other committed environmentalists whose expert advice was generously made available and led me to change my mind.

So when we are told the outcome of the review these are factors we must keep in mind because you can be sure that, if the decision to go ahead is made, we will not be told the whole truth and military links with the USA may well be the real reason.

11/1/02