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LONDON - The British government yesterday approved construction of the first new nuclear power plants in a generation, saying atomic energy could help fight climate change and secure the country's energy supplies in an increasingly unstable world.
Britain joins a growing list of countries rethinking the long-unpopular nuclear option, driven by global warming, geopolitical uncertainty, and rising fuel prices. Environmentalists, however, condemned the move as an expensive and dangerous folly that would divert resources from the search for genuinely clean forms of energy.
Energy Secretary John Hutton told the House of Commons that nuclear power "should have a role to play in this country's future energy mix, alongside other low-carbon sources."
He said that nuclear energy was a "tried and tested, safe and secure" source of power and that atomic energy was good for the environment and for national security.
Britain will move from producing most of its own energy to importing much of its oil and gas by 2020 as North Sea supplies run out, and the government has warned of the risk of becoming reliant on imports from unstable parts of the world. "Nuclear power will help us meet our twin energy challenges - ensuring secure supplies and tackling climate change," Hutton said.
The government did not announce plans for specific new nuclear facilities but said it would consider proposals from international energy companies. Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the government was "inviting companies to express an interest in building a new generation of power stations to replace the existing ones."
The announcement puts Brown's government firmly on the pronuclear side of a debate that divides opinion across Europe. It's a reversal for the governing Labor Party, which came to power in 1997 with a manifesto that said: "We see no economic case for the building of any new nuclear power stations." Four years ago, the Labor government described nuclear power as an "unattractive" option.
But by 2006, then-Prime Minister Tony Blair was arguing that Britain needed nuclear power to meet rising demand and to reduce dependence on oil and gas imports from the Middle East, Central Asia, and Russia.
European countries vary widely on atomic power, from complete rejection - in Italy and Denmark, for example - to a warm embrace in France, which gets more than 70 percent of its electricity from 59 nuclear reactors.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has campaigned for more countries to adopt nuclear power to combat global warming. Unlike fossil fuel-fired power plants, nuclear stations do not produce the greenhouse gases that are blamed for global warming.
Britain sees nuclear energy as key to its goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 60 percent of 1990 levels by 2050.
Britain gets almost a fifth of its electricity from nuclear power stations. But the last new plant opened in 1995, and all but one of the existing facilities are due to close by 2023.
Hutton said he hoped the first of the new plants - paid for entirely by the private sector - would be up and running "well before 2020." French energy company Electricite de France has said it wants to build four nuclear plants in Britain by 2017.
Unions and business groups generally welcomed the government's announcement.
"Nuclear's proven ability to generate low carbon electricity means it can play a valuable role," said Richard Lambert, director-general of the Confederation of British Industry.
Environmentalists, however, accused the government of ignoring the biggest problem with nuclear energy: how to dispose of the radioactive waste it generates. The government said yesterday that it would publish proposals for ways of storing nuclear waste underground.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
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