E3G’s Chair and Co-founder Tom Burke is interviewed on BBC Radio 4 concerning the UK government approving the Sizewell C Project, a new nuclear power site in Suffolk, and whether nuclear is needed to meet the UK’s commitment of net-zero by 2050.
Excerpt from the interview:
This plant and others like it are not needed in order to meet the net-zero by 2050 commitment. There are an enormous number of energy experts who say that we can get there using renewables and storage. We don’t need new nuclear. It’s not going to help us with getting to net-zero, because net-zero by 2050 means that we have to get fossil fuels out of the power sector by 2040. I believe that we can have one hundred percent of our power generation through renewables by 2050 and so do lots of other people. We don’t need new nuclear power stations which actually will squeeze out the investment we need to meet the challenge of needing to get on with it, and getting on with it fast. The really important thing is to make the right choices. Governments of either party over the whole of this decade have been pretty bad at reading the future, and have made a lot of the wrong choices in the past, so we shouldn’t have any confidence that they will get this one right.
This interview originally appeared on BBC Radio 4. Listen here:
