Beyond Nuclear International
Nature at risk
UK Nuclear regulations will destroy havens for wildlife. This needs to be stopped, argues The Wildlife Trusts
The following is a position statement put out by The Wildlife Trusts in Britain, after the UK government published its response to the Nuclear Regulatory Review 2025. (Note: Ed Miliband is no longer the the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero since the departure of Prime Minister Keir Starmer.) After a massive public outcry, the most environmentally damaging proposals have been watered down. However, the Labour government has committed to new guidance about how to apply nature rules. This tinkering with protections could still lead to damage to nature-rich spaces. Writes the The Wildlife Trusts, “Resistance to this dismissive approach to nature is growing and we’ll keep sticking up for nature.” Their statement:
Recommendations in the Nuclear Regulatory Review put nature at risk
Wildlife and natural places need more protection, not less. But the UK Government is thinking about making it even easier and cheaper for developers to destroy our last few natural spaces.
A report called the Nuclear Regulatory Review is suggesting that protections for nature should be weakened. It says these protections result in unnecessary costs for developers. This is not true. We can’t afford to destroy the few havens we have for wildlife.
This isn’t policy yet – there’s still time to stop this from happening. That’s why we encouraged our supporters to take our simple action to send an email to Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, and help us to stop this in its tracks.
The Nuclear Regulatory Review proposes weakening the Habitat Regulations
The Review proposes amending the Habitats Regulations so that developers don’t have to worry about avoiding harm to nature sites when they build nuclear plants. It also proposes removing a duty on public bodies to further the conservation and public access purpose of National Parks and National Landscapes.
Nature cannot afford this. Evidence continues to show that nature is in decline, and damage to nature is also damage to climate.
The Prime Minister previously suggested he wants the proposals to apply beyond the nuclear sector
In a speech on 1st December, the [then] Prime Minister said he agreed with all recommendations in the Nuclear Regulatory Review and also asked the Business Secretary to apply them to sectors beyond nuclear in the upcoming Industrial Strategy. This means the harmful recommendations could be extended beyond potential new nuclear energy sites.
If Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) gives the green light for the harmful Nuclear Regulatory Review recommendations, it makes a second damaging Planning Bill inevitable. This will slam the door on nature’s recovery and make net zero even harder to achieve.
If those proposals go ahead, people will suffer as well as wildlife
The recommendations in the Review will make natural spaces less safe from development and more vulnerable to damage and loss. These spaces might be close to where you live, or special landscapes that you visit and care about. The UK has already lost more biodiversity than any other country over the last few decades.
The risks of environmental damage through these recommendations will also have knock-on impacts for economic stability, which affects everyone through the cost of living.
Allowing the natural world to be neglected in this way will only benefit a handful of developers who can cut costs by bending the rules in future.
In the last year, the UK Government has targeted nature and wildlife, calling spiders and bats and newts ‘blockers’ and deliberately getting rid of legal safeguards and policies that are supposed to help nature recover. This goes against all evidence, and the public’s views that nature is necessary to everyone. Evidence shows a healthy environment underpins our economy and our wellbeing, and that building with nature in mind helps to ensure development is high quality and sustainable.
The original published statement can be read here on The Wildlife Trusts website.
Headline photo: RSPB Minsmere by Airwolfhound/Wikimedia Commons.
The opinions expressed in articles by outside contributors and published on the Beyond Nuclear International website, are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Beyond Nuclear. However, we try to offer a broad variety of viewpoints and perspectives as part of our mission “to educate and activate the public about the connections between nuclear power and nuclear weapons and the need to abandon both to safeguard our future”.
From memory of harm to culture of responsibility
The International Day Against Nuclear tests should never be treated as merely symbolic but as a moment to pause before a human memory that remains painfully alive, writes Dr. Ghassan Shahrour
Every year on 29 August, the world marks the International Day Against Nuclear Tests. It should never be treated as merely a symbolic entry on the global calendar. It is a moment to pause before a human memory that remains painfully alive. Since the first nuclear explosion in 1945, more than two thousand nuclear tests have been conducted across different regions of the world. Behind these numbers and locations are human stories: people exposed to radiation, families who lost loved ones, and communities forced to live with health and environmental consequences that have stretched across generations.
From the plains of Kazakhstan to the islands of the Pacific, and from former Soviet test sites to American testing grounds, nuclear tests were never merely technical experiments. They left deep marks on human lives and ecosystems. The last confirmed nuclear explosive test was conducted by North Korea in 2017, a reminder that the prohibition against nuclear testing cannot be treated as a settled achievement.
From Memory of Harm to a Culture of Responsibility
Remembering the victims of nuclear tests is not a return to the past for its own sake. Memory, when joined with responsibility, becomes a force for preventing the repetition of harm. Years of discussions and seminars on nuclear disarmament and human security have shown that the challenge is not only to keep the danger of nuclear weapons visible, but also to ensure that the voices of those harmed do not disappear behind technical and strategic language. Behind every test site there is a human life. Behind every number there is a family, a community, and a memory.
This is why a human-centered culture of disarmament is needed. Such a culture does not view weapons solely through their technical capabilities, nor does it measure security by the size of arsenals or the strength of deterrence. It asks a more fundamental question: What happens to human beings when military power becomes a permanent source of danger?
Nuclear weapons may be described in terms of strategy, deterrence, and balance, but nuclear tests reveal another side of the story: bodies exposed to radiation, environments damaged, and communities forced to live with consequences they never chose. When we restore this memory, disarmament becomes a human issue before it becomes a technical one.
Read MoreThe Big Small Modular Reactor Short
As it turns out, loss-makers with no revenue aren’t such a big draw on Wall Street, writes Linda Pentz Gunter
Guess who’s making money from the alleged small modular reactor boom? Or rather, guess, who’s not making a profit? We’ve been calling the SMR schemes “crypto nukes” for a while, because they seemed like the same kind of scam as the crypto currency racket. But, it turns out, the SMR mirage has more in common with the US subprime mortgage scandal.
That debacle, which played out from 2007 to 2010, was immortalized in the excellent 2015 docudrama, The Big Short. It dramatized the true story of financial outsiders who realized that the US housing market was propped up on bad loans doomed to fail. By betting against those loans (the “short” of the title), before the market collapsed, they made themselves small fortunes.
On August 18, the Financial Times ran a headline, “Short sellers reap $2bn profit as modular nuclear reactor stocks tumble.” (The article is behind a paywall, so we’ll paraphrase and quote it instead.)
It revealed how, predicting the “hype cycle” was about to collapse, and the fact that the three SMR companies in question — NuScale Power, Nano Nuclear and Oklo — were “lossmaking and have little or no revenue,” the short sellers pounced, reaping $2.1 billion in profits.
The article, replete with graphs showing plunging loss lines, paints a damning picture of an over-inflated industry with no actual there, there. “A total of $30.3bn has been wiped off their collective market value since their peak in October last year amid growing concerns over the lack of immediate revenue and the long build-out timelines for the technology,” the Financial Times reported.
Beyond the three companies shorted, another of the close to 80 small reactor startup projects, X-energy, also “shed $5.8bn in market value since the surge that followed its initial public offering in April,” Ramsey Hodgson, the FT reporter wrote.
Read MoreHeatwave hell
Fires and droughts could not spell out more clearly why nuclear power is the worst kind of risk under climate crisis conditions, writes Linda Pentz Gunter
You would think after the last several weeks we just had, the promoters of nuclear power might be tempering their messages a little. Or even reconsidering their position if they haven’t yet drunk too many gallons of the nuclear Kool-Aid.
But what we are seeing instead is a continued and relentless propaganda campaign re-affirming the “milestones” and “breakthroughs” of new nuclear power projects.
For example, Deep Fission, with its plans to try to drop what could eventually be as many as 100 15MW micro reactors down mile-deep boreholes in the tiny community of Parsons, Kansas (population 9,600), crowed about a recent approval from the US Department of Energy.
What the DOE approved was the company’s Nuclear Safety Design Agreement for its Gravity™ Nuclear Reactor. Deep Fission described this as “a major regulatory milestone.”
What it really amounts to is permission to keep on doodling on the napkin, or, put less snarkily, that they may proceed with their reactor design.
Read MoreWhere has all the disarmament gone?
The rulers of the nine nuclear-armed nations are busily upgrading their nuclear weapons arsenals, writes Lawrence Wittner
Although 81 years have passed since the atomic bombing of Japan in August 1945, the rulers of major nations continue their reckless march toward a nuclear holocaust.
The nine nuclear powers (the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea), possessing some 12,100 nuclear warheads, are all busily upgrading and expanding their nuclear weapons arsenals at an accelerating pace. Nuclear weapons spending rose to an all-time high of $119 billion in 2025―a 19 percent increase over the preceding year. The U.S. government alone, which accounted for more than half of this spending, is embarked on a $1.7 trillion, decades-long nuclear weapons buildup.
As the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) has observed, “this overwhelming spending on nuclear weapons shows a willingness to research, develop, finance and build tools to exterminate humanity.”
Moreover, international nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements among the nuclear powers have collapsed. Russia and the United States own 86 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons and, although they signed numerous treaties in the past to limit or reduce the size of their nuclear arsenals, the last of these treaties, New START, expired this February.
The accelerating nuclear arms race is accompanied by repeated threats of nuclear war. Russian officials are particularly notorious in this connection. According to the Voice of America, from early 2022 to late 2024 Russian officials publicly issued 135 nuclear threats, with 27 of them coming from Vladimir Putin. But America’s Donald Trump has also publicly and repeatedly threatened other countries with nuclear destruction, as has North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
Read MoreThe powerful impact of six haunting minutes
A beautifully rendered animation from 1956 is the most effective anti-nuclear war message that hardly anyone has seen, writes Linda Pentz Gunter
Sometimes the most effective way to communicate the evils of nuclear war is also the most infinitely simple.
We have read books and reports and analyses about the horrors of the United States atomic bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on August 6 and 9 respectively.
And we’ve been chilled by the dramatic films On The Beach (1959), Fail Safe (1964), The War Game (1966), The Day After (1983), Testament (1983) and Threads (1984), which depicted the horrors of a nuclear attack. Even US President Reagan was supposedly awoken to the imperative of nuclear disarmament after seeing The Day After. Sadly, he sabotaged those chances in the end by clinging to the ludicrous and ineffective Missile Defense System, nicknamed “Star Wars”.
There are fewer nuclear weapons today — just over 12,000 — than during the height of the Cold War when there were more than 64,000, but still enough to destroy the world many times over. And instead of disarming, the major nuclear weapons nations are once again rearming as the world becomes ever more destabilized by wars, climate pressure and the fight for control of resources. Nuclear arsenals in the US, Russia and China are growing larger and more lethal.
But the suicide path our leaders are still taking us on was anticipated well before the feature films and television dramas warning us of the omnicidal outcome of nuclear war; and before the scientist Carl Sagan and colleagues introduced us in 1983 to the concept of nuclear winter, its inevitable aftermath.
Their story, and ours, is to be found in A Short Vision, a film released in 1956. It is six minutes of agonizingly moving and even visually beautiful animation made by a British couple on their kitchen table. The film has all but disappeared from memory and public discourse but is thankfully viewable on YouTube.
A Short Vision was made by Hungarian born artist and painter, Peter Foldes and his British wife Joan with sponsorship funds from the British Film Institute’s Experimental Film Fund. The eerie and frighteningly evocative score was the work of another Hungarian emigre, Matyas Seiber. The narration is by British actor James McKechnie.
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