The consultation was a sham, says Pete Roche

The UK government’s consultation on the Future of Nuclear Power – forced on it by a successful legal action brought by Greenpeace – ended on Wednesday 10 October.

By coincidence, Wednesday was also the 50th anniversary of Britain’s worst nuclear accident when the reactor core at Windscale caught fire, sending a plume of radioactive material across the country.

Five decades ago, secrecy and cover-ups did nothing to reassure those with growing doubts about the risks of nuclear technology. Today, the closed consultation has carried on the tradition, according to Greenpeace, of wilfully misleading the public.

Pre-emptive PM
‘We have made the decision to continue with nuclear power,’ said Gordon Brown, at his first Prime Minister’s Question (PMQ) time on 4 July 2007. With those ten words, he managed to break the law, sabotage the ongoing consultation and do a U-turn on his promise to listen to the people.

He was meant to be abiding by a High Court ruling that says the government can’t legally make a decision on whether to build new nuclear power stations before a proper public consultation has been carried out. Instead, he made this second consultation in as many years look as much of a sham as the first one which was so pilloried by the High Court. Civil servants were reported to be ‘having kittens’. At PMQs on 11 July, Gordon Brown was forced to read a prepared statement, saying he’d only decide about new reactors after the consultation.

‘Public relations stitch-up’
Britain’s leading environmental groups then withdrew from the consultation just prior to 8 September when deliberative consultation workshops, organised by Opinion Leader Research (OLR), were held in eight cities around the UK with 1,100 members of the public. They were asked to assess the case for and against nuclear power and then take a vote.

The environment groups said the government had failed to fairly reflect the arguments presented at the meetings, and was distorting the evidence. Friends of the Earth’s Director, Tony Juniper called the consultation ‘deeply flawed’ and said, ‘It is clear that the government has essentially made up its mind … we are not prepared to take part in this latest government farce.’

The groups published a dossier accusing the government of ‘conducting a public relations stitch-up’. It complained that materials provided for the public were misleading, inaccurate and biased towards nuclear power – full of pro¬nuclear opinion masquerading as fact.

Academic protest
Independently, 20 senior academics say the consultations were deliberately skewed by linking nuclear to fears about climate change – because the government knew from past research that it’s the only way to get people to accept nuclear, albeit reluctantly. And they say the participants were misled. An inconvenient truth about nuclear – that it can only make a small contribution to reducing the UK’s overall CO2 emissions – was buried. 

Paul Dorfman, Senior Research Fellow at the National Centre for Involvement at the University of Warwick, said the exercise was designed to come up with a popular mandate to proceed with nuclear power. The information given to the public was biased and incomplete, casting fresh doubt on whether the government has followed a court ruling to present both sides of the argument.

One participant said it quickly became clear the intention was to provide very limited, biased information in order to lead the participants to a predetermined conclusion.

Formal complaint
Greenpeace made a formal complaint to the Market Research Standards Council about numerous breaches of the body’s code of conduct by Opinion Leader Research at the deliberative workshops, and is considering further legal action. Greenpeace lawyers have written to the government, calling its consultation techniques ‘a complete charade’.

Unsurprisingly, results from the deliberative exercise suggested tentative public support for the government’s plans. Nearly half (44 per cent) agreed that it would be in the public interest to give energy companies the option of investing in new nuclear power stations. Just over one-third (37 per cent) disagreed, while 18 per cent neither agreed nor disagreed and one per cent didn’t know. But 83 per cent of people said they were either concerned or very concerned about safety and security issues associated with nuclear energy, and 90 per cent were very concerned or quite concerned about creating new nuclear waste, indicating that serious misgivings about nuclear power remain.

Meanwhile the Prime Minister appeared, yet again, to pre-judge the outcome of the consultation when he told the Labour Party Conference he wanted the UK to become a ‘world leader in energy and the environment, from nuclear to renewables.’

Reference
See Greenpeace Video ‘Another Bad Idea Sponsored By the UK Government, Oct 2007’

Pete Roach is an Energy and Environment Consultant