Letter: Nuclear does much harm via the Financial Times

12 December 2019

I read your report “EU agrees rule book for green investments” (December 6), on the newly established EU “taxonomy for sustainable activities” for investment in energy, and found it extraordinary that nuclear energy has been included under a categorisation that screens options under a “do no harm principle”, which was pushed for by MEPs.Do these MEPs and European Commission’s energy directorate officials not remember the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986, which has cost more than €500bn in clean-up costs and lost land utility in Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and several western European countries including the UK and Austria?Do they not recall the more recent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe in 2011, which is still radioactively polluting the Pacific Ocean, and would have bankrupted its owner-operator Tepco if the Japanese government had not stepped in and bailed out the company with taxpayers’ money?Ignoring or downplaying serious environmental risks of nuclear power — as do the three University of Cambridge academics, along with their Finnish research professor colleague (Letters, December 6) — does not remove the objective danger. It just misleads elected decision makers.Dr David LowrySenior International Research Fellow,Institute for Resource and Security Studies,Cambridge, MA, US

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