Jeff Immelt CEO General Electric "nuclear power hard to justify"

international | anti-war / imperialism | opinion/analysis Monday July 30, 2012 17:19 by boroba

Jeff Immelt, the chief executive of General Electric was interviewed by the Financial Times at the weekend . He told the paper that « nuclear power is so expensive compared with other forms of energy that it has become “really hard” to justify « . On the face of it ,Immelt's comments would seem to be at odds with General Electric being one of the world’s largest suppliers of atomic equipment. So what is going on ?

The first thing that should be said is that Immmelt must,as the head of a multinational corporation, be a highly political individual. He would have therefore have weighed the political import of his words very carefully . Despite the fact that he claims to be a Republican, Immelt has close connections to the Obama administration - last year Obama hired hm as his jobs creating czar. In 2008 Reuters reported how he had derided republican presidential candidates for suggesting that the United States should work toward “energy independence” — a concept that he said was “naive.” : “People shouldn’t even be able to say those words because we are so far away from that.” »

Viewed in context of the overall strategy of US imperialism, Immelt's words become clearer and their publication today by the world's leading financial daily paper should be seen as a sinister development. For the past decade US policy has been to prioritize « regime change » in Iran and overturn the 1979 revolution, which placed the country's energy resources outside the control of American business interests.

Anti-war campaigners and warmongers alike have up until now maintained a strange alliance, both sides maintaining that there is no direct evidence to prove that Iran's nuclear program is aimed at building nuclear weapons. The reality is that the production of energy by nuclear fission has always been completely inefficient in economic terms and has always been bound up with the production of nuclear weapons .Nuclear powering of national grids is a by product deriving from the need to produce nuclear weapons, not the other way around. Jeffrey Immelt's words may indicate that imperialism is now about to acknowledge that fact so as to justify an attack on Iran.