Tony Blair is wrong to love nuclear energy

Towards the end of his time in office, Tony Blair came over all nuclear. A new generation of atomic energy plants, he told a CBI conference in 2006, would provide Britain with clean, carbon-free energy as well as boost national energy security. He didn’t last long enough in Downing Street to see it through, but this week he is banging the drum for nuclear energy again. The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has published a polemic, A New Nuclear Age, which dismisses fears over safety and cost to propose that Britain once more plunges headlong into new nuclear plants.

‘Public perception of the risk of nuclear power is not commensurate with the actual risk,’ it asserts. ‘The world is now paying a price for letting lingering concerns about safety and ideological opposition deter governments from harnessing a key solution to powering economies in a clean way.’ Had the industry not been killed off by irrational fears and carried on expanding at the rate it had been in the 1960s and 1970s, it goes on to claim, the world could have saved 28.9