“Jobs Jobs Jobs!” screams the nuclear lobby

And the media faithfully regurgitates the message.

It’s not new, but it is now being spouted with a new exuberance (or desperation?) in Britain:

“Hinkley C construction set to create 3,000 new jobs in next 18 months.” Construction Enquirer 11th Feb 2025, West Somerset Free Press 10th Feb 2025, Burnham-on-sea.com 10th Feb 2025, BBC 10th Feb, 2025, Somerset Live 10th Feb 2025, “creating thousands of highly skilled jobs” – Adam Smith Institute 10th Feb 2025, Irvine Times 10th Feb 2025.

As a child, I always wondered why people got so excited at the idea of more jobs. I used to think that they didn’t really want the jobs. They just wanted the money that you get paid for the job. And really, that still applies.

I now know that jobs can also bring personal satisfaction,  pleasure in doing something well, in knowing that your work is valuable. But I’d have to question that, regarding some jobs – for example, in the 1960s if you worked for the Dow Chemical Company, making napalm to burn Vietnamese children. And I question it about the nuclear weapons-nuclear power industry.

Today, we know about ionising radiation causing illness and deaths, about the environmental damage of the nuclear fuel chain, the waste problem, about the intrinsic connection between the “civil” and military nuclear industries. We also know of the increasing evidence that the nuclear industry is not a healthy workplace.

So, why is the nuclear lobby spruiking “jobs” as the reason for the nuclear industry? The UK has an official unemployment rate of 4.4%, not wonderful, but not a crisis – not a statistically very high rate for a G20 country I would have thought that the biggest arguments for a new nuclear industry would be that it’s supposed to fix climate change, to be a clean industry, to be an economically successful industry.

The trouble is, people are waking up to the ample evidence that nuclear power cannot fix climate change, is not clean, and most critical for Britain, it is not economically viable. That’s why the industry can’t get investors. The UK government has to supply direct funding through grants and investments to get new nuclear happening, particularly for projects like Sizewell C.

There’s a constant stream of corporate media articles, about the nuclear resurgence and the great future  for employment in the (non-existent) small nuclear reactors. Professor Ramana of the University of British Columbia has questioned this resurgence, and examined what is actually happening:

“I would first dispute the idea that there is an actual resurgence in nuclear power. What we are seeing is a resurgence in talk about nuclear power.”

 

The media, when it republishes handouts from the nuclear lobby, is not doing journalism. It’s just repeating propaganda .

It is hard to find proper journalistic scrutiny on the jobs situation in UK’s nuclear industry. But there is such scrutiny:

• Only 20 % of Great British Nuclear staff employed permanently.
• The Wylfa project – will deny local people of Ynys Môn the opportunity to take up green jobs in the interim… For the reality, as established at the two existing gigawatt projects, at Hinkley Point C in Somerset and increasingly at Sizewell C in Suffolk, is that, for these large construction projects, large national and multinational civil engineering contractors are engaged, with experience in delivering mega projects at this scale, and they bring with them specialist subcontractors with their own transient workforces.
• Hinkley Point C ‘using cheap foreign labour‘, say striking workers.
• Nuclear power is nothing if not hugely capital, not labour, intensive.

I can only conclude that Sr Keir Starmer’s Labour government is all too well aware of the money pit into which they are plunging Britain, with these grandiose nuclear projects of Hinkley Point C, and Sizewell C. They must be hoping to get the British public, and investors, enthused about the nuclear job market, especially at a time when the government is about to make brutal cuts in welfare benefits. The rather dodgy assumption might be that human beings – disabled or too ill to work, family carers, suddenly losing income, will be able to work in the supposedly expanding nuclear industry.