Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-11-16-Speech-3-061"
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"en.20051116.4.3-061"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I shall use this opportunity to carry on where the previous speaker left off. I have to say, following my visit to the United Kingdom last week, that I find it very irritating that Tony Blair and others are steering the climate change debate towards the idea that climate protection targets might be achieved by the greater use of nuclear power, which would produce energy that is alleged to be cleaner.
I would like to take this opportunity to disabuse you of a misconception, and to ask what you, in England, currently mean when you talk about cleaner nuclear energy. Are you talking about the extraction of uranium, which is a peculiarly filthy business? Are you talking about fuel enrichment, which is particularly dirty? Are you talking about the conversion of uranium hexafluoride, which is a very difficult process involving high levels of environmental pollution? When you talk about clean atomic energy, do you mean the manufacture of fuel rods in Russia? Have you, in England, ever discussed how much waste you will have to dispose of, and when and at what cost you will do that? How do you assess the dangers and risks involved in reprocessing? Windscale is an example of the great experience you have had with the real damage reprocessing does to the environment and to people. I am quite astonished that it is the British of all people, who in fact abandoned nuclear energy on economic grounds, who are pushing forward this crazy debate on ‘climate protection through increased use of nuclear energy’.
Let us just consider the global picture: if we want to be really efficient in making a contribution through nuclear energy to protecting the climate, we will have to build hundreds, thousands more nuclear reactors. That would, in fact, involve the massive expansion of a new generation of fast breeders, which have already proved such a devastating failure in Europe. It would involve the operation of reprocessing facilities throughout the world, because the stocks of uranium available would be nowhere near sufficient for such an expansion of nuclear energy.
To engage in such expansion at a time when we are debating terrorism and the risks of proliferation is irresponsible. Even though it is far more difficult to address the problems of energy by means of maximising energy efficiency, cutting back our use of it, or some other approach, let us now, at last, start doing so and keep on doing so, rather than returning to the use of a technology that is actually already consigned to the past century and the pollution and waste from which we have not yet even begun to get to grips with."@en1
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