Latest updates: outgoing prime minister promises investment in nuclear power in Suffolk and says he is ‘confident’ it will get over the line
Speaking from Sizewell in east Suffolk, Boris Johnson begins by talking about a “much-thumbed” Ladybird book he owned as a child, which was called The Story of Nuclear Power.
He says he was “enthralled” to read how UK scientists split the atom for the first time at the Cavendish laboratories in Cambridge. He said he noted how the world’s first civilian nuclear power station was built in Cumbria.
I look back at the optimism in the pages of that book and I look at what has happened since and at the short-termism of successive British governments and their failure to do justice to our pioneering nuclear history … and I feel like one of those beautifully drawn illustrations of that Ladybird book of what happens in a nuclear pile.
The graphite rods are taken out at the wrong moments and my blood starts to boil and steam starts coming out of my ears and I think I’m going to meltdown. I ask myself the question: ‘What happened to us?’.
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