15th October 2007

Martin Whitesides' letter to local press re teh Government's plans for nuclear power and scuppering the EU renewables target.

The Government's farcical 'consultation' on nuclear power has just come to an end. Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, WWF, Gloucestershire Green parties and more withdrew from the process after attempts to make the consultation fair and full were dismissed and ignored by the Government.

In September the Government 'consulted' in nine venues across Britain 1,000 randomly picked members of the public: showing them a variety of biased materials and asking them loaded questions. Hardly a representative sample of our 60 million population! Indeed why bother when Gordon Brown, in Parliament on July 4, had already said "we have made the decision to continue with nuclear power''.

Nuclear is not the answer to energy security, the energy gap, or to reducing our carbon emissions. Energy efficiency measures alone would help us to cut our carbon emissions by up to 30 per cent, yet nuclear will only cut 4 per cent by 2025-2030.

Our centralised power generation system is scandalously wasteful: two-thirds of generated power is lost as waste heat. In contrast a decentralised system utilising combined heat and power has double the efficiency, as the heat produced by electricity generation is captured to provide heating for homes and industry.

Britain also has enormous potential for wind, wave and tidal power, yet we lag fourth from the bottom in an EU league table and now Gordon Brown is trying to scupper EU targets to have 20% renewables by 2020. This is shameful.

Councillor Martin Whiteside
Hillside, Claypits Lane, Lypiatt, Stroud
Stroud Green Party Parliamentary Candidate