Image: The George Monbiot Nuclear Greenwash 2026 Award to The Green Party for Abandoning Nuclear Opposition. George Monbiot’s famous “I love nuclear” in the wake of the Fukushima disaster deflected an otherwise inevitable crisis of nuclear confidence and was of course key to the push for the building of the first new nuclear plant in the UK in decades at Hinkley C which he now says (after facilitating the damn thing) should be scrapped in favour of, even more dangerous. fast breeder reactors,
Just days before the 69th anniversary of the UKs worst nuclear accident to date , the Windscale Fire, the Green Party announced their abandonment of their opposition to nuclear, and with it their reason for being. The Green Party used to call the nuclear industry the “nuclear military industrial complex” for good reason, the “civil” nuclear industry is necessary in order to produce elements for military use, including plutonium, tritium and americium.
Here in Cumbria we won’t notice much difference as the Green Party have spectacularly failed to publicly voice strong opposition or lead any charges against nuclear developments for many years with Green Party members seemingly much more concerned with the horrible nitty gritty of political advancement than protecting the health and wellbeing of the public and our environment from nuclear developments.
Having said that we wait more in hope than expectation to be surprised and delighted by vigorous, strong and principled Cumbrian Green Party opposition to the tsunami of nuclear developments coming our way.
It has not gone unnoticed that despite there being more Green councillors than ever before on Cumberland council, the Council as a whole is like never before, acting as a facilitating arm of the nuclear industry. Cumberland council and its Green Party members are partners in the geological nuclear dump plan and partners in the plan to bring Japanese sodium coolant to Cumbria amongst other things.
Bizarrely the Green Party in Cumbria even had to be persuaded long and hard by Radiation Free Lakeland to oppose the earth quake inducing coal mine near Sellafield with the Green Party’s candidate, in the 2017 Whitehaven hustings Jack Lenox actually saying he was “a big fan of coking coal” this despite its close proximity to Sellafield. The coal mine was finally refused largely on the grounds of induced seismicity.
Professor Chris Busby has this to say: “the Green Party began as an anti-nuclear party in Germany, with Petra Kelly. When I chained myself to the gates of Trawsfynydd Nuclear Power Station in Wales in 1992, Petra Kelly had agreed to come and support our campaign against opening the nuclear site, which was dangerous. The station operators had applied to run the reactors at a high temperature to anneal the cracks in the pressure vessel. This was not long after the experiment at Chernobyl. And the contamination of Wales by Chernobyl (which led to sharp increases in cancer and child leukemia)…..The nuclear police had pistols and we were told they would shoot us. Petra Kelly was assassinated a few months after this. How can I say this? How do I know? Well, of course I don’t know and cannot be sure. But here is something you don’t know about this. The story now widely accepted (look at Wikipedia) is that her man, General Gert Bastiaan killed her.
The police determined that Kelly was shot dead while sleeping by Bastian, who then died of suicide.
Well and Good. But I spoke with Prof Ernest Sternglass about this. He knew both of them, and said it was impossible that Bastiaan would have killed her and himself. They were full of positive energy and life, when he met them in Berlin some 6 weeks before she died. She was very excited. She had received an offer of considerable financial support by German TV to make a series of documentaries with Russian and Belarussian scientists including Dr. Shevchenko, to report on the real health effects of the Chernobyl accident contamination. At the time, the nuclear operators and their tame scientists in the IAEA and the WHO were stating that there were no measurable health effects. It was the same at Fukushima some twenty years later. But back in those days they killed you, rather than using media to destroy your credibility.”
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