Max Fries: “we don’t have to wait for fusion to have an energy revolution!”AVDA

Across the world’s green movement, creeping continental drift is occurring. What was once a shibboleth for environmentalists, the very foundation of green politics itself, seems now to be a divisive taboo to be brushed under the carpet in the pursuit of greater goals. From renegade ex-Greenpeace activists to po-faced NASA geeks, the movement against climate change has put the nuclear baby in the corner. The Green Party seem increasingly divided over the matter and even Friends of the Earth recently reviewed their policy, moving to an opposition “in practice” rather than “in principle”. Is all well in the greenie world, and has the nuclear bug reached Cambridge yet?

Rupert Read – the most recent Green Party PPC for Cambridge – was keen to correct me on this, telling me that “the issue is simply not very contentious within the Green Party” and insisted that the “small minority” who wished to revisit the matter were “comprehensively defeated” at the last conference. Indeed, Read seemed quite in tune with the old-school of thinking on nuclear, emphasising the high costs, the long development time, and the burden of waste which it leaves to our children. As he put it: “do we really want to bequeath an open-ended toxic legacy to our grandchildren?”

More modest on the matter was co-chair of Cambridge Young Greens, John Bachelor. While for him “there are a lot of unresolved issues” relating to nuclear energy, “there is an open debate in the Cambridge Young Greens”. One Green Party activist I spoke to, Max Fries, was clear on where he stood. For him it seemed a matter of green values, of standing up for long-term sustainability and a respect for human and environmental rights. “Nuclear is very much a social justice issue for me,” he told me, citing the destruction caused by the uranium ore mines of Australia and Nigeria. In contrast, his argument for renewables is centred on a vision of devolved community power; a supply of energy which “breaks the power of the energy companies”. He gave Germany as a prime example of this, where 50 per cent of renewables are owned by community enterprise groups and citizens. But the issue did not come down just to morals, and the received wisdom about the scientific argument for nuclear power was clearly an annoyance to him: “When you campaign in Cambridge, you have a lot of conversations with academics,” he said, with the suggestion that a bias existed on the issue. Fries believes that some people have been misled, as nuclear facilities take over 17 years to set up, and, as Rupert Read also noted, actually have a hefty carbon footprint.

It seems that this could be a difficult topic for groups like Zero Carbon, who hope that divestment from fossilfuels will eventually lead to investment in green renewables. Their spokesman told me that “for a sustainable future we need to transition from fossil fuels, and this is the main target of the Zero Carbon campaign”. Nobody I spoke to seemed to disagree that even if nuclear emissions are singeing the planet, it doesn’t hold a candle to oil. Despite an apparently shifting consensus more broadly, in Cambridge there doesn’t seem to be much hostility over the issue.

Even in terms of job creation, local activists are sceptical of the benefits which nuclear might bring. Tabitha Spence, a green jobs activist, told me that while there would certainly be new jobs in “transportation and construction” at first, “nuclear plants are highly mechanised” and so “don’t offer massive amounts of jobs once operational”. Perhaps it is the sheer scale of the challenge faced by the anti-nuclear campaign which holds it together in spite of fissures which would tear a lesser movement apart. No doubt, the Holy Grail in all of this is fusion, but Max Fries seemed to sum up the consensus on this when he told me, exasperated, “we don’t have to wait for fusion to have an energy revolution!”