The conservativehome.com blog

I believe...

Do you remember Michael Howard’s January 2004 statement of beliefs? They were criticised at the time for their motherhood-and-apple-pie character but they did amount to an aborted CCO attempt to embrace positive politics. I recently came across a Canadian ex-blogger’s beliefs statement and I thought I’d try one of my own. I’ve outlined at least one belief for each of conservativehome.com’s main ten themes:

From Springfield to Sellafield

So, Max Hastings has come out in favour of a new generation of nuclear power stations. That’ll be the end of that idea, then. Like many other supporters of nuclear power, Mr Hastings is a gentleman of certain age with a history of supporting big, ugly, centralised and expensive solutions to problems we don’t really have. For instance, Mr Hastings was an enthusiastic supporter of the European Union and all its works, and used his position in the commentariat to excoriate the Conservative Party for failing to see the light.

Of course, if the Conservative Party is to embrace nucleoscepticism alongside euroscepticism then it will need more evidence against nuclear than the dodgy record of the nucleophiles. Readers of this blog will recall the recent news that twenty tonnes of highly radioactive uranium and plutonium had leaked from a pipe at Sellafield’s Thorp reprocessing plant. At the time, it was unclear exactly when the leak has taken place. The news, ahem, leaked out shortly after the election and there was a suspicion that things had been hushed up in order to keep nuclear power off the campaign agenda.

But according to the Daily Telegraph the truth is rather is rather more disturbing:

Don't take the nuclear option

Just as Mr Blair suddenly remembers he wants to build some nuclear power stations (did it slip your mind during the election campaign, Tony?), twenty tonnes of uranium and plutonium dissolved in concentrated nitric acid leaks out of a pipe at Sellafield’s Thorp reprocessing plant.

Parts of the Sellafield complex have been closed down, at a cost of £1 million a day – a tab to be picked up by the taxpayer, as our money is all that is keeping the nuclear industry afloat. Of course, a million a day is nothing compared to the ten of billions it will cost us to decommission Britain’s ageing nuclear power stations and store their radioactive waste.