… but mostly for foreigners, as The Guardian notes. However, it would not be much different if we were building conventional power sources. Nuclear and gas plants both are largely built by foreign companies, and often using immigrant labour. Whether our energy is green or not, we seem to have abandoned this vital strategic interest to foreign firms - while our people fill supermarket shelves and don't even get paid.

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Hey if you can get a british perma-dole brat to do a fatigue analysis on a reactor vessel, fill your boots. Come to think of it, if you can get one of them to stack shelves properly you're doing well.

I should imagine they are doing fatigue analyses most of the time ... although rarely on reactor vessels, I would suspect.

Filling out the benefit form for their "fibro myalgia"

With some links to Kent, I have talked to some lads who worked on the construction of the Dungeness Nuclear facility, they didn't know of any foreign workers - except those from London and Sussex, of course. Now, with de-commissioning going on at Dungeness, the climate bods have said Dungeness is at risk of SL rises [FFS on a depositional coastline!! - the engineers and surveyors in the fifties didn't think so but then they weren't worrried about the earth warming up cos their teacher said so]. All the grid infrastructure in place and they are decommissioning and not rebuilding a new facility - that is pure financial lunacy and economics from the madhouse.

Fatigue analysis on reactor vessels, well we did once have the skill set and engineers and scientists but that sort of stuff - taught and learnt at University and in allied nuclear industry died out about 25 years ago - it's not something you can teach overnight. Dumbing down, post normal BS and Marxist ideology [equality, LGBT attitudes, muliticulti, non competition] is what they teach kids these days - dunno if shelf stacking is a GCSE?

On the graun' piece, all you hear [or used to hear] from Miliband and Camoron and all the green loonies, was how the green energy agenda was going to be a bonanza for British jobs - and anyone who actually believed that [Miliband, Camoron, Lucas] is gonna be sadly disappointed.
FFS, it is reckoned [oft quoted fact but for all that I believe it is on the low side estimation] that for every green job - some 2.5 jobs are lost in the real economy - ask 'em in Spain - where the green agenda has been binned, the once gung-ho greenie mad Germans are having second thoughts............incredible [I don't believe it] GERMAN pragmatism concerning the green agenda WTF?

What we are left with, here in Britain is the 'DANCE' - therefore the promulgation and propaganda of 'thousands of green jobs for British workers' - even for those with suitable skills, this is BS and the whole of the Westminster claque knows it - but the charade [shock horror!!!] is played out.

We know it, they know we know it but the game is played and nothing changes, until next years black-outs of course - that will be a game changer and/or, the euro goes tits up.

I know the ruling elite have never been economically literate but at what point did even that lumpen mass start to think it was a really good idea to have three people creating as much (in this case energy) as was previously created by one . . . ?

In celebration of Dickens 200th birthday, all I can do is misquote Tiny Tim - " . . . God help us, everyone"

It will only be a "game changer" if the Praetorian Guard is eliminated from the picture. How like do you think THAT is?

Our man does make me laugh sometimes.

Surely this is true work experience. Part of 'jam tomorrow' (but only for some).

Best regards
Nigel Sedgwick

Speaking to someone who has been involved on the project management side of the construction of the Olympic venues, and who is likely to be involved at Hinkley and Sizewll where the first of the nukes are going to be built. He made the point that whatever your views on whether we should be hosting the Olympics you had to concede that all the venues have been built on time, and the construction phase has been a success. He has had some preliminary dealings with EDF, and says they are very unreceptive to hearing any ideas that are not their own, and he's not optimistic about the plants being built on schedule. They seem determined not to learn any lessons from Flamanville, where the plant they are building is some years behind schedule.

Apparently after Fukushima the reactor buildings were redesigned to accommodate ell the pumps etc that were taken out by the tsunami, so that can't happen in the new plants. That redesign was done in the UK I was told, although in the grand scheme of things it wasn't a huge piece of work.

Not forgetting the Defence minister who said recently that British firms have no right to expect favouritism in defence contracts. If a foreign country gives a better quote, then they get the work.

Or perhaps that the hospitality industry offers low wages and shit conditions, tolerated by immigrants, and gap-year tourists who are prepared to work short-term for a pittance, the former living in conditions that no-one in Britain should be asked to do (ten-to-a-room, hot bedding, etc). The hospitality industry, historically, relies on cheap labour, and will always lead the race to the bottom. Well qualified British kids are not welcome because their expectations are too high.

I'd add highly migrant labour isn't too bothered by Council Tax &c., so I can see that there is a level of pay that a legal local couldn't live on.