Bryony Katherine Worthington, Baroness Worthington, (born c. 1972),[1] is a British environmental campaigner and Labour life peer in the House of Lords. She has promoted change in attitudes to the environment, and action to tackle climate change, and founded Sandbag, a non-profit campaign group designed to increase public awareness of emissions trading, in 2008.[2]
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She was born and grew up in Wales,[3] and graduated in English literature at Queens' College, Cambridge,[4] before joining Operation Raleigh as a fundraiser. In the mid 1990s, she worked for an environmental charity, and by 2000 had moved to work for Friends of the Earth as a climate change campaigner. She then worked for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, implementing public awareness campaigns and helping draft the Climate Change Bill, before becoming head of government relations for the energy company, Scottish and Southern Energy. She left to form Sandbag in 2008.[5]
She was raised to the peerage as Baroness Worthington, of Cambridge in the County of Cambridgeshire, in 2011, and sits on the Labour benches.[6]
The Baroness was once "passionately opposed to nuclear power,"[7] but came to advocate the adoption of Thorium as a nuclear fuel following the 2009 Manchester Report,[8] an event on climate change mitigation held by The Guardian. Worthington hosted and served as a judging panel member for the Manchester Report; there she met nuclear engineer Kirk Sorensen who presented arguments for using Thorium.[9] Sorensen intends to develop a LFTR (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor) based on the 1965-1969 Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment.
Worthington is patron of the Weinberg Foundation, a British non-profit, non-governmental organization dedicated to the promotion and development of molten salt reactor (MSR) technology.[10][11][12] It was formally launched on 08 September 2011 in the House of Lords, named in honour of Alvin M. Weinberg (1915–2006), a nuclear physicist who pioneered peaceful nuclear technology and advocated Thorium energy, and is based in Somerset House in central London.[9][13][14][15]
"The world desperately needs sustainable, low carbon energy to address climate change while lifting people out of poverty. Thorium based reactors, such as those designed by the late Alvin Weinberg, could radically change perceptions of nuclear power leading to widespread deployment." — Baroness Worthington[16]