“Nuclear power is hugely expensive and far too slow to come on line. The only thing delivered by EDF so far at Hinkley Point in Somerset is overspend and delay. Electricity was promised by 2017 with a price tag of £22bn but this has mushroomed to 40bn and Hinkley is still producing no power.
“The money being spent on this nuclear gamble would be far better spent on insulating and retrofitting millions of homes, bringing down energy bills and keeping people warmer and more comfortable. We should also be investing in genuinely green power such as fitting millions of solar panels to roofs and in innovative technologies like tidal power. All this would create many more jobs than nuclear ever will.”
Esmail Baghaei, spokesperson for Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Photo: MFA
Iran claimed the proposed nuclear deal submitted May 31 by the US did not reflect the essence of the five rounds of indirect talks between the two countries.
On Sunday, June 9, Iran condemned a fresh round of US sanctions on its citizens and commercial entities, calling them a reflection of the US’s long-standing hostility towards the country and its people.
Esmail Baghaei, spokesperson for Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, described the sanctions as a flagrant violation of international laws and another attempt to deny Iranians their fundamental rights and increase their hardships.
The administration of Donald Trump issued fresh sanctions against dozens of individuals and entities in Iran on Saturday, continuing its so-called maximum pressure campaign to force Iran to abandon its nuclear program.
The sanctions targeted the individuals and entities involved in banking and other commercial activities. Some of the entities are based in Hong Kong and the UAE. The US targeted them by accusing them of being involved in “money laundering” and “shadow banking” activities for sanctioned entities, such as the National Iranian Tanker Company.
NITC is sanctioned for its involvement in the export of Iranian oil which is targeted by the US as part of its maximum pressure campaign. The US has alleged that proceeds from the oil trade are used for the development of nuclear weapons by Iran.
Iran has claimed it has every right to have a peaceful civil nuclear program as a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and denied it has any intention to develop nuclear weapons. It has termed US sanctions against it illegal and a violation of its sovereignty and demanded their immediate withdrawal.
The new sanctions were announced despite ongoing talks between Iran and the US on the nuclear issue. On May 31, the US submitted a proposal for a deal after five rounds of indirect talks.
Reflecting on the content of the US proposal, Baghaei said on Monday that it did not reflect the essence of the talks so far. He claimed that Iran is preparing its own proposal for a deal which will be submitted to the US through Oman in the coming days.
Iran has repeatedly made it clear that it will not consider any proposal for a deal if it is asked to abandon its peaceful nuclear program and sanctions imposed by the US are not lifted completely.
IAEA must not be politicized
Meanwhile, Russia warned on Sunday that any anti-Iran resolutions in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board of governors meeting scheduled to begin on Monday will not “bring positive results.”
Russia’s permanent representative to Vienna, Mikhail Ulyanov, claimed that the expected anti-Iran resolution by European signatories of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – the UK, France, and Germany in collaboration with the US – would be counterproductive for the ongoing peace efforts.
Ulyanov was referring to the reports in western media which claimed that E3 along with the US have already drafted a resolution against Iran to be presented during the IAEA meeting. The draft accuses Iran of non-compliance in its safeguard obligations for the first time in two decades.
The resolution is part of E3’s threats of invoking snapback sanctions against Iran, which were withdrawn following the signing of the JCPOA in 2015 by a resolution in the UN Security Council.
The European signatories of the JCPOA have recently been following the US line on the Iran nuclear program. In the years following the US unilateral withdrawal from the deal in May 2018, however, these nations expressed a desire to revive it.
Iran has maintained that all calls for snapback sanctions are illegal. It has asserted that its decision to gradually withdraw from its commitments under the JCPOA were based on the provisions of the agreement itself and a response to the US and E3 failing to keep their own commitments under the deal first.
Reiterating the Iranian position, spokesperson for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) Behrouz Kamalvandi said on Sunday that if others “return to their commitments [to JCPOA], we will do the same.”
Iran has warned E3 of counter measures to the imposition of snapback sanctions. On Sunday, Iran also warned the IAEA of counter measures if the said resolution was adopted, claiming such resolutions are “politically motivated” and a result of US dominance over the agency.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
The NDA said the “leak in the Magnox Swarf Storage Silo is contained and does not pose a risk to the public”
The UK’s largest nuclear site could continue leaking radioactive water until the 2050s, MPs have warned, while its clean-up operations struggle to progress quickly enough.
The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) criticised the speed of decommissioning work at Sellafield in Cumbria, citing “cost overruns and continuing safety concerns” in a report published on Wednesday.
Although the committee noted there were “signs of improvement”, PAC chairman Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown said Sellafield continued to present “intolerable risks”.
The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) acknowledged the leak at its Magnox Swarf Storage Silo (MSSS) was its “single biggest environmental issue”.
The MSSS, which the NDA described as “the most hazardous building in the UK”, has been leaking radioactive water into the ground since 2018, releasing enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool every three years.
It is likely to continue leaking until the oldest section of the building has been emptied in the 2050s, about a decade later than previously expected.
Sir Geoffrey said: “As with the fight against climate change, the sheer scale of the hundred-year timeframe of the decommissioning project makes it hard to grasp the immediacy of safety hazards and cost overruns that delays can have.
“Every day at Sellafield is a race against time to complete works before buildings reach the end of their life.
“Our report contains too many signs that this is a race that Sellafield risks losing.”
UK newspapers have already launched more editorials attacking Ed Miliband in the first four months of 2025 than they did during the whole of 2024, Carbon Brief analysis reveals.
In the year to date, predominantly right-leaning publications have published 65 editorials – articles seen as the newspaper’s formal “voice” – criticising the UK energy secretary, compared with only 61 across the full year of 2024.
Nearly four sucheditorials have been published every week so far in 2025, roughly three times the rate of the previous year.
This is a significant escalation from a period that had already seen an unprecedented torrent of attacks levelled at the energy secretary.
The articles, which primarily appear in the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, frequently seek to label Miliband as a “net-zero zealot” with a “messianic” devotion to climate action.
They have also tried to blame him for the potential closure of the UK’s remaining steel plant and – most recently – misrepresented the words of former prime minister Sir Tony Blair to falsely present them as a personal rebuke to Miliband.
Many of the articles urge prime minister Keir Starmer to “sack” Miliband due to his supposedly “radical” policy ideas, referring to him as a “liability” for the Labour government.
Despite this near-obsessive stream of criticism and constantspeculation about the energy secretary’s job security, the prime minister has said unequivocally that the net-zero agenda is “in my government’s DNA” and that Miliband is “doing a great job”.
Record criticism
The UK’s Labour government won an election last summer, with a large majority, on the back of a manifesto that focused heavily on climate action.
As laid out at the time, one of the government’s “five missions” was to:
“Make Britain a clean-energy superpower to cut bills, create jobs and deliver security with cheaper, zero-carbon electricity by 2030.”
Miliband, the energy security and net-zero secretary, is the minister overseeing this brief and the public face of much of the government’s net-zero strategy.
This position has resulted in a relentless stream of criticism and personal attacks from right-leaning commentators and media organisations, against a backdrop of rising political and press opposition to net-zero.
Carbon Brief analysis in January revealed the scale of the personal attacks levelled at Miliband in newspaper editorials during 2024, both in the lead up to the general election and in the months that followed.
However, the new analysis shows that the 61 critical editorials published last year have already been eclipsed in 2025 after barely four months of intense focus on Miliband.
As of 2 May, predominantly right-leaning newspapers have already published 65 editorials taking aim at the energy secretary this year. The chart below, which shows the cumulative number of such editorials, highlights this rapid escalation.
Cumulative number of UK newspaper editorials criticising energy secretary Ed Miliband in 2024 (blue) and 2025 so far (red). Source: Carbon Brief analysis.
Specific events, often only vaguely related to the energy secretary, have inflated the criticism of Miliband in the media.
One example was the imminent closure of the UK’s last remaining steel blast furnaces in Scunthorpe, in early April. Right-leaning newspapers blamed Miliband, among other things, for “banning new coal mines” in the UK, which they argued could have provided coking coal to the facility.
(The Scunthorpe site’s owners prior to government control, British Steel, had said that the coal from a planned mine in Cumbria would not have been suitable for their needs.)
More recently, right-leaning newspapers have used the furore around a report published by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) as a further opportunity to criticise Miliband.
Many publications misleadingly interpreted comments by Blair as a criticism of the Starmer government’s net-zero policies and, by association, Miliband himself. They described the energy secretary as an “eco-loon” compared to the “uncontroversial” advice from Blair.
Miliband the ‘fanatic’
The majority of the criticism of Miliband in newspaper editorials in 2025 has come from the Daily Mail, the Sun and the Daily Telegraph.
The Sun remains the most consistent critic of Miliband, with 26 editorials published in 2025 so far. There have only been 18 weeks in 2025 to date. As the chart below shows, this spate of 26 editorials from the Sun is already approaching last year’s record of 29.
UK newspaper editorials criticising Ed Miliband, broken down by publication, in 2024 and 2025. Source: Carbon Brief analysis.
The attacks levelled at Miliband by right-leaning newspapers are often both highly personal and somewhat melodramatic.
They frequently imply that his focus on net-zero policies is a sign of mental instability or quasi-religious devotion, rather than being part of his job title – or acknowledging that reaching net-zero emissions is the only way scientists say climate change can be prevented from getting worse.
The Sun has referred to Miliband’s “uncontrolled fanaticism”. The Sun on Sunday has described the “madness of Ed Miliband’s green crusade” and called him the “fanatical prophet of net-zero”.
Another editorial from the Sun stated that “Miliband is so blinded by eco-ideology that he’s lost touch with reality”, referring to his “eco insanity”.
In an editorial lamenting the state of the UK’s oil-and-gas industry, which shed 10s of 1,000s of jobs under the previous Conservative government, the Daily Mail mentioned:
“Energy secretary Ed Miliband’s messianic desire to sacrifice a multi-billion pound industry on the altar of net-zero.”
The newspapers also suggest that Miliband is unwilling to listen to any criticism. “Miliband has shown himself unprepared to countenance any suggestion that his efforts to decarbonise the grid within five years might be reckless,” the Daily Telegraph claimed.
There have also been frequent calls from newspaper editorials for Starmer to sack the energy secretary. In an article titled “Miliband’s madness”, published at the end of April, the Daily Mail asked:
“Isn’t it time Sir Keir Starmer accepted his colleague’s ideological net-zero fervour is damaging the government – and sacked him?”
Beyond the editorial pages, there has also been a constant stream of comment pieces, many by climate sceptics, which often go even further in their attacks on the energy secretary. “Miliband belongs in a padded cell,” Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn wrote at the start of May.
This has come amid much media speculation from commentators on both the left and right that Starmer is considering firing Miliband.
However, Starmer has not given any indication of doing this.
On the contrary, at the recent energy security conference the UK government hosted in London, Starmer stated that he was fully committed to his government’s net-zero ambitions. “That is in the DNA of my government,” he stated in a widely covered speech.
dizzy: Miliband has been vilified by the same right-wing climate science deniers in a similar way to Just Stop Oil and others labelled zealots. I object to his and thereby the current Labour government’s policy of supporting Carbon Capture and Nuclear for different reasons. Both are false solutions needing huge government subsidies, carbon capture and storage is an unproved, false solution proposed by the fossil fuel industry to enable them to continue destroying the planet, nuclear supports producing nuclear weapons and [ed: is] hugely capital intensive producing radioactive waste that needs to be managed for thousands to millions of years. A far better response is rapid decarbonisation including conversion to renewables and to travel far less, prevent the rich from causing so much damage.
SELF-DECEPTION: A 245-tonne steel dome is lifted onto Hinkley Point C’s first reactor building, at Bridgwater, Somerset on December 15 2023 – note the slogan on the banner
The government’s nuclear power expansion plan is a hollow betrayal of working people that panders to wealthy corporations and will rip off consumers, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
…
The restriction on building new reactors on existing nuclear sites is to be lifted so they could be built anywhere and everywhere and people who “hadn’t thought there’s going to be anything nuclear near me” will simply “get used to the idea of it,” Starmer said.
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The whole thing is of course a massive con that would, if such a plan ever materialised, dramatically raise electricity rates, further fleece taxpayers, impede real progress on climate by diverting money away from already available renewable energy solutions, and put countless communities in danger.
And of course, what will become of the radioactive waste these “small” reactors would still produce? A recent Stanford study found that small modular reactors will actually generate more radioactive waste than conventional nuclear power plants.
Unions should not be fooled. Promising jobs that will likely never materialise and would be better created immediately in industries such as renewable energy that are here now and have a long-term future, isn’t a boon to working people, it’s yet another betrayal.
Further, nuclear power, as the industry has itself demonstrated over and over, is the slowest and most expensive energy choice among the so-called low-carbon options.
No nuclear reactor, small or otherwise, will ever be built in time, affordably or in enough quantities to address the climate crisis that is already upon us.
