Brussels, 31/03/2008 (Agence Europe) - The expansion of nuclear power n the United Kingdom mooted by British prime minister Gordon Brown during the official visit of French president Nicolas Sarkozy to London last week has generated outrage from the Green group at the European Parliament. The President of the Green group, German MEP Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and Luxembourg MEP and energy expert Claude Turmes, explain in a press release that Gordon Brown's appeal for an expansion of the UK's nuclear programme seems to have come from a different planet. The UK already has a mountain of radioactive waste that it doesn't know how to dispose of. The financial costs of this are colossal - amounting to nearly €100 billion already! The nuclear waste reprocessing and plutonium production sites at Sellafield that were supposed to generate income have in fact led to a collapse of the entire waste management funding system. There is absolutely no industrial infrastructure left in the United Kingdom to build the main components of nuclear power stations, they add. The Green MEPs argue that the UK's French partner was no better. After two and a half years of work, the construction of the first EPR reactor in Finland is more than two years late and is already 50%, €1.5 billion, above budget. The MEPs explain that bottlenecks in construction capacity, lack of qualified staff, continual delays and excessive surcharges are typical of the current situation in the nuclear industry around the world and the situation is worse in the United Kingdom than in any other nuclear country. London is therefore demonstrating a total lack of sense, they add, and investing the same amount of money in energy efficiency and renewables would be more effective and create more jobs. (E.H.)