Kwasi Kwartang's brazen nuclear energy deceptions

Tory Energy Minister Kwasi Kwartang has released a short Twitter video boasting about the Tory government's nuclear energy policies.

The problem of course is that it's every bit as honest as you'd expect from a government led by the most notorious liar in British politics.

Kwartang's description of the government's nuclear energy policy states that it will deliver "clean, affordable power generated in the UK, for the UK". 

Every single word of this is either deceptive, or a downright lie.

Clean

The idea that nuclear power is "clean" is an absolute fairy story. In reality Finland is the only country in the world preparing permanent safe storage for all of their nuclear waste. Britain's nuclear waste storage is an absolute shambles. For decades we just lobbed it in landfill, buried it in trenches, threw it down a well at Dounreay, and even set ourselves up as the nuclear dustbin of the world, importing nuclear waste from as far afield as Japan.

Most of Britain's nuclear waste is stored at the Low Level Waste Repository near Drigg in Cumbria. This enormous 270 acre site contains one million tons of nuclear waste, in temporary storage, and it's at risk of coastal erosion and flooding!

Amazingly this huge nuclear dumping ground is being run as a private profit-making company, but when it needs clearing up, there's absolutely no doubt that it will be paid for out of public funds.

Around 75% of the most radioactive waste in the UK is in temporary storage at Sellafield. The most recent cost estimate (2015) for cleaning up the radioactive dumping ground there is an astonishing £117 billion.

Anyone claiming nuclear energy in the UK is "clean", when we don't even have a single permanent nuclear waste storage facility is quite simply lying through their teeth.

Generated in the UK

One of the main boasts in Kwartang's little clip is about the construction of the Hinkley Point C reactor, which will admittedly be geographically located within the UK.

But what Kwartang deliberately omits to mention is the fact the the UK government has bribed the French government (in the guise of EDF) and the Chinese government (CGN) to build it for us.

The reason Britain can't build its own new nuclear infrastructure is that the Tory government privatised away our nuclear expertise, with Britain's entire fleet of nuclear power stations eventually falling into the hands of the French government (EDF).

Have you ever been informed by the BBC or by corporate media about the fact Britain handed control of its entire fleet of nuclear power plants to the French government?

Maybe ask yourself why the majority of the UK population have been kept in the dark about this utterly extraordinary situation.

Affordable

The only way the Tory government could get the governments of France and China to build them a new reactor at Hinkley Point C was to bribe them into doing it by promising to pay them double the market rate for electricity for 35 years. 

The National Audit Office have estimated that the terms of this deal mean that UK energy customers will end up paying an astonishing £50 billion above the natural market rate.

£50 billion siphoned out of the pockets of UK energy consumers, by the state-run energy companies of France and China, and this deceptive Tory piss-taker is telling us how "affordable" it's going to be!

For the UK

The idea that energy generated in the UK is exclusively "for the UK" is another deception. 

In the case of natural gas, exports out of the UK have doubled during the energy crisis, because the profiteering private companies operating our energy sector are driven exclusively by the profit motive, not by any desire to maintain the energy security of whichever nation they're operating in.

The only reason the French and Chinese governments would definitely be selling their electricity to the UK, is that the UK is the only country on earth stupid enough to promise to pay them double the market rate for 35 years.

If the UK government seriously wanted to secure the nation's energy supply, they'd take the sector out of the hands of the private profiteers and foreign governments it's fallen into since privatisation, and operate it as a not-for-profit publicly owned business, run for the good of the British people and the British economy.

Only a fool would think that promising to pay the governments of France and China double the market price for electricity was a good idea, and something to boast about. And only a downright liar would try to pretend that it represents a strengthening of the nation's energy security!

Conclusion

The inescapable conclusion is that Kwasi Kwartang is a profoundly deceptive character, who either doesn't understand the first thing about his ministerial role, or is lying through his teeth.

But it's more sinister than just one Tory minister churning out deceptions. The whole department is rotten to the core. 

It's beyond doubt that energy privatisation has been an absolute disaster for the UK, but instead of bringing it back under public ownership, they're bribing the French and Chinese governments to build our energy infrastructure for us, and then dressing this absurd nonsense up as if it represents some wonderful safeguarding of Britain's energy security.

Anyone in the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy with even the slightest clue what's actually going on knows perfectly well that it's a pack of deceptions and lies.

And any BBC/corporate media journalist who pays the slightest attention can see what a shambles it is too, and how deceptive Kwartang's being.

But there's a code of silence, so nobody speaks out.

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