Once again, working people — this time in Britain –have been betrayed with false promises about jobs in an industry that is actually making climate change worse, writes Linda Pentz Gunter

At this point there is no need for any of us who are inclined toward commentary to further point out the utter dereliction of the UK government led by Sir Keir Starmer. It is doing a perfectly fine job on its own. The faux pas have now reached such a fever pitch that we’ve almost forgotten the free flats and fancy gifted suits.

As scandal after scandal swirls around members of Starmer’s ever diminishing inner circle, the craven subservience to war mongers continues. In September, the British government managed to kowtow to two in the space of a single week — first welcoming Israeli President Isaac Herzog to British soil, then US President Donald Trump.

On his arrival, Herzog might have heard the distant slamming of a door behind the departing deputy prime minister, Angela Raynor, or he may have passed disgraced former UK ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson, slipping back into Britain.

Next came renewed turmoil around accusations that Starmer’s Chief of Staff, Morgan McSweeney, might have used an undeclared Labour Together “secret slush fund” to support Starmer’s ultimately successful campaign to become the new Party Leader in 2020. Labour Together was the entity used to mount a smear campaign against former Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn, falsely accusing him of anti-Semitism.

Investigative journalist Paul Holden’s soon to be released book —The Fraud, Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy — is likely to shine an even brighter light on the details and will be celebrated by both the left and the right.

All the while, the ridiculous spectacle of serving police offers arresting old age pensioners for holding homemade signs opposing the Gaza genocide and the preposterous proscription of non-violent direct action group Palestine Action, continues to leave egg stains on Downing Street faces.

Daily Mail columnist, Dan Hodge even posited that perhaps “Keir Starmer hoped the stench of sleaze and scandal enveloping his administration would begin to dissipate following the successful state visit of Donald Trump.” 

It is hard to divine what might be deemed “successful” about Trump’s visit. In at least one case, it marked yet another great betrayal of British working people, coming in the form of the “Golden Age of Nuclear” deal struck between the US and UK governments. The title alone betrays its false veneer and utter subservience to Trump and his cabal.

Trump, as we know, is obsessed with gold. Accordingly, on May 23, the US president had proudly announced a new executive order — “Restoring Gold Standard Science”. It will come as no surprise that it in fact dismantles anything that smacks of actual science. That same day, Trump also  “unleashed” (a favorite word) four executive orders trumpeting a nuclear renaissance.

Next, Trump promoted his $176 billion “Golden Dome for America” missile defense system, another fantasy reboot of former US President Ronald Reagan’s ill-fated Strategic Defense Initiative, mockingly nicknamed “Star Wars” that was supposed to shoot down incoming nuclear missiles but which mostly missed them in test runs.

The Golden Age of Nuclear announcement, aside from being at best aspirational and at worst a hollow deception, also betrayed in its choice of copycat rhetoric just how sadly subservient both Starmer and his energy secretary Ed Miliband are to the current American regime. They must, perforce, sing from Trump’s golden hymnbook.

It is perhaps most telling that the “Golden Age of Nuclear” appears to be nothing more substantial than a press release, with a long list of endorsements by heads of corporations on both sides of the Atlantic who have a vested interest in seeing the deal go forward.

The “golden age” announcement was replete with Trump-style hyper-masculine hyperbole, boasting of “homegrown energy” and “major new deals that will turbocharge the build-out of new nuclear power stations.”

The deal would drive forward “the government’s energy superpower mission to take back control of Britain’s energy for good.” Working people will be the big winners.

Unfortunately, the track record of nuclear power to date, and the extreme uncertainty surrounding whether any of the companies vying to build new reactors will actually deliver, means that the opposite is true. 

Timelines for reactor construction even for the known, familiar models such as the two being built by EDF at Hinkley Point C for example, are far longer than before. Recently completed new reactors in the US, Finland and France have uniformly run well over budget, sometimes as much as three times over or more. 

There will be no jobs in new nuclear power projects for working people anytime soon. When and if jobs do materialize, those suited to working people will likely be temporary, in construction. Many jobs will require highly specialized skills for which working people will not have been trained.

The rogues’ gallery of nuclear companies that signed their names to the deal have already proven to be unreliable at best and certainly devoid of any interest in serving the needs of working people. Indeed, as with all major corporations, their sole motive is profit. 

Among them are American companies such as Holtec, which paid a $5 million penalty to the state of New Jersey in January 2024 to avoid criminal prosecution related to a 2018 application for $1 million in tax credits. Billionaire Bill Gates went cap in hand to the US Department of Energy for his company TerraPower — also on the “golden list — demanding and receiving a $2 billion subsidy for his $4 billion Natrium reactor. British taxpayers can expect to be similarly fleeced.

French company EDF is there, despite its multiple debacles around the world, delivering its EPR reactors late and over-budget, their construction repeatedly interrupted by technical errors and faulty parts. After Hinkley Point C, it is planning to build two more reactors on the Suffolk beach at Sizewell, an insane proposition under climate conditions alone.

US companies such as Radiant and the somehow appropriately named Last Energy, join the many others on Miliband’s press release, but none of the reactors promoted by these and other American companies have actually received a license. They are simply paper reactors. Mere mirages.

The boast that somehow the deal will deliver “energy independence” and “homegrown energy” is, to be generous, disingenuous. What is missing from the conversation is the uranium necessary to make the fuel for the proposed reactors. Unless the Starmer government is plotting to reopen the fight with residents of Orkney, who already beat back efforts in the mid-1970s to mine uranium there, there is nothing “homegrown” about nuclear energy.

Where will that uranium come from? The main uranium exporting countries are Canada, Australia and Kazakhstan. Niger is also high on the list. In almost all cases around the world, uranium is mined on the land of Indigenous peoples who take the full burden of the contamination this causes to their air, water and land, but languish in poverty while the mining companies profit. When the mines close, the companies leave, abandoning surrounding populations to suffer endless exposures from the radioactive waste left behind.

The High-Assay Low Enriched Uranium (HALEU) fuel needed for some of the new reactor designs — including the one promoted by Gates — is almost exclusively produced by Russia. Trump has bragged about opening HALEU production facilities in the US, but nothing has happened. Whilst he has deployed an oil and gas embargo on Russia, uranium imports remain conveniently exempt.

Perhaps the most alarming aspect of the “golden” nuclear deal is the declared intention to shortcut the regulatory process. Nuclear power plants are inherently dangerous. The new designs have not demonstrated that they have overcome these challenges. Indeed, most if not all of them are new versions of old designs whose predecessors have a record of fires, explosions and other technical failures.

But the UK-US deal states it “will make it quicker for companies to build new nuclear power stations in both countries, for example by speeding up the time it takes for a nuclear project to get a licence from roughly three or four years to roughly two.”

Shortcutting safety oversight in any sector is never a good idea. It is particularly reckless when dealing with nuclear power. And it is even more so if Britain is to take the Trump administration on its word that a particular reactor has been deemed safe by the US regulator and therefore requires no safety scrutiny by its UK counterpart.

That’s because Trump has set about to dismantle the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, ordering the agency to “rubber-stamp” new license applications and prioritize production over safety. He is picking off anyone within the agency that disagrees and replacing them with “yes men”, one of whom is the compliant lapdog chair of the NRC, David Wright, a Republican appointee quoted in the Golden Age press release.

The “Golden Age of Nuclear” is one more great deception, dangling hope where there is none, another blast of empty hype that, if it goes forward, will waste time and money on unproven nuclear capers when Britain could achieve greater carbon emissions far faster for the same investment in renewable energy. 

Indeed, choosing slow, expensive nuclear power instead of renewables results in greater use of fossil fuels in the meantime while renewable energy projects are shoved aside in favor of nuclear projects that don’t materialize in time if at all.

Starmer calls the US nuclear partnership a “landmark”. He says it’s about “powering our homes, it’s about powering our economy, our communities, and our ambition.” It’s that last word that contains the only morsel of truth.

Headline photo of Keir Starmer and Ed Miliband by Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street.

Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear and writes for and edits Beyond Nuclear International. Any opinions are her own.