The Green Party and Nuclear Energy
https://christobusby.substack.com/p/the-green-party-and-nuclear-energy
and Thousands Say “No” to Drax’s AI Data Centre Bid: “Burning Forests to Power AI is Not Green
Oct 09, 2026 by Dr Christopher Busby
The recent Brighton conference policy change of the Green Party of England and Wales to embrace nuclear energy was sad but not unexpected. I have believed since Fukushima that the nuclear operators (which we used to call the nuclear military complex, or their agents, the nuclearists) had started seriously focusing on the last political fortress of those opposing nuclear. In the hysteria following Fukushima, they were forced to bring out their Queen, George Monbiot and his Guardian megaphone. This began with his Pauline conversion (no one has died from the radioactive releases) and moving to his attacks on me, on Christopher Busby (false scientist, fraud). I have written and spoken elsewhere that all that he said about me (peddling anti-radiation pills and making stupid epidemiological mistakes) was a pack of lies and half-truths, supported by bogus scientists like Gerry Thomas so I won’t say any more here about that. Except that the Green Party immediately disowned me, and all the funding I was receiving (Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, the Goldsmiths, the Gillettes) vanished.
But at the time, I was the Green Party National Speaker on Science and Technology, and immediately following Fukushima, I explained the problem on prime-time TV News for the BBC and also ITN. You can see these interviews on Youtube still. Everything I said then (opposed by some pro-nuclear furby) has since been shown to be true. Cancer and leukemia rates have increased in Japan, and also generally every country that provides cancer data.
But the Green Party began as an anti-nuclear party in Germany, with Petra Kelly. When I chained myself to the gates of Trawsfynydd Nuclear Power Station in Wales in 1992, Petra Kelly had agreed to come and support our campaign against opening the nuclear site, which was dangerous. The station operators had applied to run the reactors at a high temperature to anneal the cracks in the pressure vessel. This was not long after the experiment at Chernobyl. And the contamination of Wales by Chernobyl (which led to sharp increases in cancer and child leukemia).
AI (Bless her cotton socks) has this to say:
In 1992, the specific direct action involving anti-radiation scientist and activist Dr. Christopher Busby at the Trawsfynydd Nuclear Power Station was a coordinated blockade that chained shut the facility’s main gates
Having joined the Green Party that same year, Busby organized and led the action:
The Tactic: Activists targeted the main entrance of the power station, using heavy-duty D-locks and chains to secure themselves directly to the gate mechanisms, effectively blocking vehicle access to the site
Media Strategy: Busby deliberately tipped off major news outlets beforehand. The imagery of the locked gates and the high-stakes protest made national headlines on both BBC and ITV news broadcasts
The Aftermath: The protest successfully amplified the public safety debate surrounding the station’s embrittled reactor pressure vessels. It is frequently cited by Busby and Green Party organizers as a pivotal moment of non-violent pressure that ultimately pushed the operator to announce the plant’s permanent economic closure the following year.
We were all a bit scared by this project. The nuclear police had pistols and we were told they would shoot us. Petra Kelly was assassinated a few months after this. How can I say this? How do I know? Well, of course I don’t know and cannot be sure. But here is something you don’t know about this. The story now widely accepted (look at Wikipedia) is that her man, General Gert Bastiaan killed her.
The police determined that Kelly was shot dead while sleeping by Bastian, who then died of suicide.
Well and Good. But I spoke with Prof Ernest Sternglass about this. He knew both of them, and said it was impossible that Bastiaan would have killed her and himself. They were full of positive energy and life, when he met them in Berlin some 6 weeks before she died. She was very excited. She had received an offer of considerable financial support by German TV to make a series of documentaries with Russian and Belarussian scientists including Dr. Shevchenko, to report on the real health effects of the Chernobyl accident contamination. At the time, the nuclear operators and their tame scientists in the IAEA and the WHO were stating that there were no measurable health effects. It was the same at Fukushima some twenty years later. But back in those days they killed you, rather than using media to destroy your credibility. Erin Brockovitch for example. Ernest told me he later had a phone call from Shevchenko from Mexico who told him he was on the run and feared for his life.
Another example, which I investigated more closely was the Patricia Sheehan death in Ireland. I have done a lot of research on Ireland about radiation from Sellafield and wrote the result up in my book Wolves of Water (2006). That was funded by the Rowntrees. But in 1997 I was supported by the Irish State to carry out the research on cancer in North Wales (which Monbiot attacked) and also Ireland, where I was sent all the data from the Irish Cancer Registry to see if a similar sea coast effect existed in eastern areas contaminated by the Sellafield releases. It did.
Dr Patricia Sheehan, of Dundalk (County Louth) reported in 1983 in the British Medical Journal that there was a cluster of 6 Downs Syndrome babies born to women who attended St Louis Girls School in Dundalk at the time of the Windscale (now Sellafield) reactor fire in 1957. Later she found two more, totalling 8, a cohort of 8 mothers. This is a statistically impossible event (background rate is 1 in 1000 live births, there were 28 women in the class). and so there must be a cause. Radiation of mothers causes Downs Syndrome in the babies. But huge efforts were made to dismiss her findings and sideline her efforts. I personally met with and spoke to many of the people involved in this. Including the dodgy characters.
AI again:
Her dedication brought the case into international scientific view, though her specific theories were eventually scientifically dismissed after her death
She published further studies in 1994, continuing to argue that Sellafield’s environmental discharges were linked to Irish birth defects. Her work frequently fueled intense political debates in Ireland’s parliament (Dáil Éireann) regarding the safety of the Irish Sea
Tragically, Dr. Patricia Sheehan died in a car accident on July 7, 1994, before the definitive epidemiological review of her cluster was fully realized.
I have driven on the road she died on many times. Her car ran off the road and crashed. No witnesses. That road from Dundalk is a good wide road. An easy road. There is no way on that road that she could have run off it. She was pushed off it in some way.
For example, Rosalie Bertell told me a story once. She was returning home from a conference in New York, to Canada where she lived at the time. A big truck with rolls of barbed wire overtook her on a straight stretch of road miles from anywhere. It went in front of her and two rolls of barbed wire dropped off the back and landed in her path. She braked and swerved and by some miracle didn’t go off the road and down the hill into the forest. She sat there for a minute or two and a big Police car with two officers came up and asked her what happened. She told them; they went in pursuit of the truck. She sat there for a long time. Eventually, maybe some hours, another police car came up. She told them what happened: they said there was no other police car on that stretch.
Others have died in car accidents. I myself, when driving my 650 motorbike from Sweden to Denmark was followed closely by a big SUV. It had followed me across the country from Stockholm to Goteborg, appearing and disappearing, picking me up again after a night’s stop in Jonkoping. On the Denmark motorway south, I began to realise that I was being followed. I was not sure about the intention; they speeded up when I did and slowed down when I did. I tucked in front of another car and stayed between two cars driving at about 70 to 80mph so they couldn’t get close. It was scary. But they followed me for an hour or so across Denmark until I peeled off for Alkmaar.
Back to Petra Kelly. I spoke with Scottish Dave in Clonakilty. He said that he was at a party in Dublin where Green Party leader Sarah Parkin was peddling her book about Petra Kelly. She wrote this book to put the story about that Bastiaan had shot Kelly. She made a special point to Scottish Dave (without knowing that he was a friend) that my ideas on nuclear power and health were mad. Parkin was married to Dr D M (Max) Parkin who ran the central (IARC) operation in Lyon which was set up to provide dishonest epidemiological papers showing that the Chernobyl accident had no measurable health effects. Parkin wrote an influential paper about child leukaemia after Chernobyl which is as full of holes as a colander. How could it be that Sarah Parkin, effectively head of the Green Party and Max Parkin (whose job became the gatekeeper of bad news about Chernobyl effects) were an item? Please! Parkin (and Porritt) always headed off any Green Party official interest in the health effects.
The infiltration of the Green Party over the time I was active, with Molly Scott Cato (and before, Trawsfynydd, Dungeness, non-violent Direct Action) was significant. But you could usually spot the individuals. Some of them are still there, pulling strings, altering minutes, changing agendas, dismissing dangerous individuals for the projects they are paid to tune or disrupt. Its like this everywhere. But this essay is about the Green Party.
On Feb 5th 1998 the STOA unit of the EU asked a number of scientists to discuss the draft Radiation Basic Safety Standards (BSS) Directive, which adopted the Radiation Risk Model of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP). Those invited (by the Greens) were Alice Stewart, Rosalie Bertell, Akexey Yablokov, Jean Francois Viel (who studied child leukemia at the La Hague reprocessing plant in France) and Christopher Busby (in the red corner) with the Scientific Secretary of the ICRP, Jack Valentin in the blue corner.
Between us, we pretty much destroyed the ICRP position, citing evidence: many studies that showed cancer and leukaemia increases at internal doses that were very low. At nuclear sites and after Chernobyl. We advised the Parliament to press for a clause in the BSS which demanded a re-assessment of the Justification of using the ICRP model to provide a basis for legal limits. And the Commission did provide such a clause: it is still there. It states that if new and important evidence becomes available that shows the ICRP model is wrong, then the whole thing has to be re-thought. Justification is about how many people can die annually in order to have the advantages of nuclear energy.
One of the original clauses of the BSS allowed the dilution of radioactivity from nuclear sites into consumer goods. Yes. You read that correctly. Richard Bramhall and I started a campaign in the Green Party to have this clause removed. The TV (in those pre-Iraq days actually covered news) gave us space, including a very powerful BBC2 documentary. The EU modified the clause. All the local Green parties went out on the streets to collect signatures. We got to meet Michael Meacher, the Environment Minister, and later we persuaded him to set up the Committee Examining Radiation Risks from Internal Emitters, CERRIE. This met from 2000 to 2004 by which time it became clear that our arguments presented at the 1998 EU STOA meeting were supported, and that internal exposures were dangerous because of the ways on which the internal radioactive elements bound to DNA. What I later called radiochemical genotoxicity. The joint CERRIE study would have found, for example, that our work on the breast cancer rates near the Bradwell nuclear power station in Essex was correct: the rates were significantly high. So, CERRIE had to go: Meacher was sacked by Blair and it was swiftly shut down. Any dissenting report was banned. However, we had taken the opportunity to Sony DAT audio record every meeting and a transcript is being prepared. CERRIE was the point at which the science began to focus on internal radiation. It changed the direction of investigation.
At the 1998 conference, the destruction of the ICRP position was followed by a statement by their Scientific Secretary Jack Valentin. He said: ICRP is an independent charity and the EU can take advice from anyone it likes. The group thought about this and decided the time had come to provide independent advice based on published scientific and epidemiological evidence. We set up the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR). We were given money by the Green Party and some Charitable organisations to provide a new radiation risk model which was based on contemporary and historic evidence. Much if this evidence resulted from the Chernobyl health effects, which were increasingly being reported everywhere. By 2003, the new risk model was ready and was presented in Brussels. The book was translated into Russian, Japanese, Spanish, and French. The ECRR followed it with an International Conference in Lesvos, Greece, funded by USA lawyer Stuart Smith, to further discuss the evidence and refine the model. Scientists came from USA, Europe, UK, Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. In 2010 a new ECRR Report was published. ECRR reports were published on Chernobyl effects, on Uranium and Uranium weapons, on mechanistic aspects of radiation biology, on photoelectron effects, and on many topics. ECRR scientists were invited to make presentations in most of the countries of Europe, in Japan after Fukushima, in the USA.
The sudden reversal of the position of the Green Party began with George Monbiot and Mark Lynas. Neither were experts or even scientists. Slowly the Greens were poisoned by the insidious message of those paid to divert their attention from the health effects. The anti-nuclear position was increasingly to argue that nuclear energy was too expensive, that it was uncompetitive, that it was the low-carbon answer to climate change, which was pitched as being due to Carbon Dioxide build up. The evidence that it was killing millions was side-lined and rubbished (ECRR2003 calculated 65 million cancers). Monbiot himself had phoned me (I was in France at the time, I remember it well) before he published his seminal pro-nuclear essay in the Guardian. He asked about how radioactive emissions were causing cancer. Presumable to ask his controls how to deal with the counter arguments.
So, the aim of this essay is to point out that the Green Parties were more or less founded on the basis of anti-nuclear. If you have read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which pretty much started the environmental movement, you will remember that her main target was radioactive contamination: killing babies, causing cancer, twisting the genetic integrity of all life on Earth. Warnings historically given by a range of major scientific figures, Nobel prize winners Herman Muller, Linus Pauling, Andrey Sakharov, researchers like Alice Stewart, Rosalie Bertell, Ernest Sternglass, Karl Morgan, John Gofman, the list is long.
The Green Party had to be silenced, and they were, and now the process is complete. It was done with money and infiltration. I can name the players who did this. It included attacking the scientists personally: you don’t have to attack the science, the evidence, you ignore it. You attack the scientist. You do this in the newspapers and on the Internet. In the 2016 Test Veteran Court Case in the Royal Courts of Justice, I was not allowed to give evidence, on the basis that I was biased (i.e. my evidence opposed the ICRP model). The eminent ECRR experts we bought from Germany, Japan, and Ireland at great expense were ignored by the judge (Nick Blake) on the basis that they were members of the ECRR. Though by 2019, the Scottish High Court ruled that excluding my evidence had been Unlawful.
The other method, which the nuclearists have used since the 1990s, when I first walked into this intellectual swamp, is to set up and fund bogus anti-nuclear scientists and bogus anti-nuclear groups. The method, Bokononism, was described by Kurt Vonnegut (Cats Cradle) long ago: I can list the individuals and anti-nuclear groups and perhaps I will, but not here. This is about the Green Party.
But, as Joseph Conrad once wrote: after all the shouting is over, the grim silence of facts remains.
Those who supported the pro-nuclear motion at the Brighton conference (I read ) were mainly young people, young Greens. The Green Party in my day (1992-2011) were mostly not scientists (which is mainly why I became the Science and Technology Speaker); nowadays I look to see who is the expert on these issues and find it is the lady plumber who recently made parliament. She looks like a nice soul. And indeed, the leader Zac, looks like a nice guy. But none of them know anything about radiation (or I would guess science and technology, or epidemiology; these are arcane areas). There are no experts. And if I were to contact them to inform them that the risk model of the ICRP has killed 500,000,000 people since 1952, more than all the wars in History, they would look online, or ask AI, and be told I am a nutcase. After all, AI is just the assembly of all that’s on the Internet, providing a centre of gravity of belief. But not truth. And if you argue with AI, you can prove it wrong, then it always backs off and apologises.
The cancer epidemic began in 1980, some 20 years after the nuclear atmospheric testing 1959-63. I published a letter in the British Medical Journal about this in 1994. And wrote Wings of Death in 1995, predicting that the children born in 1959-1963 would have significant cancer excess when they grew up (they are now 60-65). They have. Those who were born in that period suffered an excess infant mortality. Those that survived have an excess cancer risk of more than 50%. We know this from studying and comparing areas of high fallout (high rainfall) with low fallout (low rainfall) by cohort year of birth in USA States, California and New Mexico (dry) versus Kentucky and Alabama (wet). This has been published in the scientific literature by two different research groups. It means that 1 in 3 cancers was caused by radiation, essentially by the nuclear scientists who have lied and twisted the truth for more than 75 years.
Those who live near nuclear sites have an excess risk of cancer, as do airline stewards, CT patients, those living near radioactive contamination, or exposed to Uranium weapons (DU, EU) residues. But the Green Party members don’t look. Their gaze is diverted to Global Warming by people like Monbiot. Who has now decided (in a new book) that we should stop livestock farming and live on bacteria and insect pancakes.