Labour’s Climate Plan for U.K. Would Abandon Key Low-Carbon Tool

Nuclear energy may have a limited future in the U.K. if the Labour party gets into power.

Even as the country’s main opposition party vows to drastically cut carbon emissions in the next decade, it also wants to rein in the expansion of one of the country’s key sources of low-carbon energy. As the price of renewable energy plummets, it no longer makes sense to fund a wholesale replacement of the country’s aging nuclear fleets, said Alan Whitehead, the opposition party’s shadow minister for energy and climate change.

“I don’t think there’s long-term room in the market for a huge fleet of new nuclear,” Whitehead said in an interview on the sidelines of a party conference on Tuesday. “If it’s going to play a disproportionately destructive role as far as markets are concerned, it really doesn’t have much of a place.”