How easy it would be to scorn the environmentalists who are up in arms about George Osborne’s new pet project, the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station. You can understand their anxiety: subsidies for green energy are being slashed, yet the Chancellor will do anything — and pay anything — to get this project up and running. He is happy to force households to pay artificially high prices for a form of energy which brings all kinds of risks — of which the world was reminded this week when Japan found the first cancer case liked to the Fukushima disaster of 2011. ‘Has the Chancellor lost his mind?’ they ask.
Some 30 years ago, Greenpeace members might have been chaining themselves to the fences outside Hinkley Point in protest at a new nuclear power station. However, in the space of a generation, atomic power has been transformed from a leukaemia-causing, earth-poisoning environmental outrage to a low carbon, ‘green’ form of energy — astonishing enough in itself.
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