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Written by SONE
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Tuesday, 31 January 2012 |
PUBLIC OPINION RECOVERS: POLITICIANS REMAIN DEAF
Happy New Year. First, the good news. Nuclear power has virtually recovered from the knock it took over Fukushima. Indeed, according to an Ipsos MORI poll between December 2 and 8 exactly half the population is now in favour of replacing existing nuclear power stations and only 20% against. That compares with a favourable 36/28% rating in June last year – three months after the Japanese disaster.
What is more, a favourable impression of nuclear power and its industry is back at the November 2010 peak of 40% while those with an unfavourable impression of it is down to 19%. This compares with a narrowly favourable 28/24% rating only six months ago. We give a little more detail below. Meanwhile, we cannot recall any month previously in which Government energy policy has been so severely hammered. The Centre for Policy Studies, Civitas and Policy Exchange think tanks, the Commons Public Accounts Committee, Which?, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Save the Children Fund, Ann Widdecombe, old uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all have been blasting away at the inadequacy of it all.
And when we say all, we refer (as we explain in more detail below) to the cost without much more nuclear (CPS); preventing effective CO2 reductions (Civitas); “excessive and unnecessary” green bills (Policy Exchange), smart meters (PAC and Which?), difficulties of reaching a zero carbon economy (RAEngineering); fuel poverty (Save the Children); and wind (Ann Widdecombe).
The bad news is that SONE has been banging away for years at these themes and still nobody seems to be listening in Whitehall or Westminster. What on earth has gone wrong with politics? Do our politicians (of all parties) believe this is the age of the masochist with everybody ecstatic about impoverishing themselves to save the world?
OUR TARGET AUDIENCE
It is, of course, a pretty safe bet that only the assiduous nuclear supporter knows that the 50% in favour of new nuclear build is a record – a 3-point improvement on November 2010. You can bet your bottom dollar we would all have known had the poll produced a record low. Nuclear is still seen as “knocking” rather than positive copy.
What Ipsos MORI also show is that, after the Fukushima hiccough, opinion on nuclear power and its industry and new build is back on its upward trend. That also goes broadly for both men and women, though opinion of nuclear power among women lags well behind men’s.
Now 62% of men support new build against 16% opposed (22% neutral or don’t know) compared with 39/23% of women, with 38% neutral or don’t know. Generally speaking, the older you get and the higher your social class the more you favour replacement of nuclear power capacity. Sixty per cent of the 55-64 age group favour new build compared with 19% against - the 65- plus group are only one point behind with a positive score of 59% - whereas the 16-24 group show only 36% for it and 22% against. A massive 42% of our youngest adults remain to be convinced.
In terms of class the ABs outgun every other classification in favour of new build on 68%, with only 14% against and 20% undecided. By contrast the DEs score only 38% for nuclear (22% opposed), with 40% neutral or undecided.” On this basis not much changes, apart from the steady pro-nuclear movement, which is immensely welcome. Women, the young and what used to be called the labouring classes remain our target audiences. The problem is still how to reach them through the alarmist anti-nuclear clamour.
WILL THIS HELP?
Our fancy has been taken by a recent report that lobbyists, trade unions and pressure groups seeking to influence government policy are to be required to sign a lobbyists’ register. This is because the Prime Minister at least thinks the next great scandal after phone hacking (or was it MPs’ expenses?) will be lobbying.
This register may well become known as The Book of Shame since Fleet Street is known as The Street of Shame. On the other hand, it may be advantageous for SONE to be registered in it. Somebody might then sit up and take more notice of us.
However, we think priority should be given to the registration of all groups which get public money to help them tell governments what they want to hear in the first place. These subventions, incidentally, also boost carbon emissions as NGOs fly by the thousand to and, unfortunately, back from UN climate jamborees from Kyoto to Durban.
THE ATOMIC CLOCK – IT’S TICKING, GOVERNMENT TOLD
To return to the past month’s hammering of the Coalition’s energy policy. The Centre for Policy Studies came out strongly for the rapid development of nuclear power in a report “The Atomic Clock: How the Coalition is gambling with energy policy” http://t.co/sGesyyXP from which it can be downloaded free.
The author, Tony Lodge, claimed that one third of all households (nearly 8.5m) would be in a state of fuel poverty – paying 10% of disposable income or more for heat and light – by 2030 unless the Government rapidly moved to encourage and enable the building of new nuclear plants. The Coalition did not have suitable plans to replace old coal- and oil-fired power supplies due to close by 2016 under EU rules. Wind farms would not be able to cover the energy shortfall and the government risked filling the gap with more gas-fired plants, making the UK dependent on gas for over 80% of electricity generation by 2025.
Nuclear generating capacity was forecast to fall by 75% over the next few years and any further delays in approving new nuclear plant would mean nuclear would not make a net contribution to UK electricity supply before 2025 at the earliest. The Government “must now move” to approve a “fair and balanced nuclear power delivery strategy which rewards all new atomic power investors”.
And so say all of us.
MORE COMPETITIVE POWER TO NUCLEAR’S ELBOW
Civitas think tank then produced a table of generating costs that put nuclear in a competitive lead by a big margin – nuclear PWR £67.8MWh; gas CCGT £96.5MWh; gas CCGT with carbon capture and storage (CCS) £102.6MWh; advanced supercritical coal with CCS £111.9Wh; onshore wind £146,3MWh; and offshore wind £179.4MWh. The rankings (as distinct from the detailed figures) are broadly consistent, apart from onshore wind, with those presented to SONE’s AGM last October by Mark Higson, head of the Government’s Office for Nuclear Development.
The Civitas report, written by Ruth Lea, economist, makes the point that the focus on wind power, driven by renewable targets, is preventing Britain from effectively reducing CO2 emissions while saddling energy users with additional costs. Since wind needs to be backed up by conventional power stations to maintain a consistent supply, energy users pay twice – once for the “window dressing” of renewables and then for the fossil fuel standby. She claims this standby cost is not reflected in Government figures for wind costs. Hence her higher estimates than the Government’s.
She sees gas-fired power as the most cost-efficient in the short-term with nuclear power taking the lead medium term. But for renewables targets wind would not even be entertained as a cost-effective way of generating electricity or cutting CO2 emissions. Indeed, quoting a Dutch study by the physicist C le Pair, she says wind power, backed by conventional gas-fired generation, can emit more CO2 than the cost effective gas turbines running alone. She calls for renewables targets to be re-negotiated with the EU.
GOING AGAINST THE HISTORICAL MOVEMENT
Ruth Lea’s call was underlined by two other recent reports. As we mentioned in last month’s Newsletter, the University of East Anglia has claimed that far from reducing carbon emissions we are increasing them – up 3.8% in 2010 (though 14% below the base 1990 level). But when emissions from the trade in goods and services produced in emerging countries but consumed in the UK are added in this country’s CO2 emissions are 46% higher than in 1990. Professor Colin McInnes FEng, writing in Ingenia, the Royal Academy of Engineering’s magazine, also warned that policies to combat climate change that favoured “green” technologies ignored the lessons of engineering history.
“We now seem determined to replace the historical transition towards fuels of greater density with diffuse energy production. This step will require vast quantities of materials, land and subsidies, misallocating economic resources that we could use more productively elsewhere. We should therefore treat with caution talk of ‘a green energy revolution’...The headlong rush into expensive green energy risks sacrificing jobs elsewhere in the economy. It also threatens large tracts of the British landscape and hits the pockets of those who could ill afford higher energy bills”.
Engineers should insist that energy policy should deliver lower costs, security of supply and now a transition to lower-carbon energy, requiring greater use of methane, with half the CO2 emissions of coal, and uranium and less use of coal and oil.
Steadily, the evidence builds up against current energy policy.
RISK OF SMART METERS “FIASCO”
Which brings us to Which?, the consumer’s organisation, and the Commons Public Accounts Committee and smart meters. These have been hailed by the Government as a means of reducing energy use and therefore energy bills by making available more information about our consumption. In fact, Energy Minister Charles Hendry has claimed there will be an £18.1bn benefit from an investment of £11.1bn.
Let us leave aside whether smart meters will have us all economising like mad, Which? wants their installation in every home halted until the Government gets a grip on costs and the PAC doubts whether energy firms will pass on their savings as a result, for example, of dispensing with meter readers.
Current plans, Which? says, contain no way of controlling costs or how they are passed on to consumers. If it isn’t careful, the Coalition could have a “fiasco” on its hands. All this comes on top of a National Audit Office warning last year of “major risks” associated with the “roll-out” and that cost benefits are uncertain. Whether these warnings will make any impression on the Department for Energy and Climate Change is open to doubt since value for money is entirely conspicuous by its absence from energy policy.
As for the poor, then the devil takes the hindmost. National Energy Action (NEA), the fuel poverty charity, has just pointed out that from next year energy companies will be forced to spend £3.1bn a year on energy saving measures in the home. The cost will, of course, be passed on to Mr and Mrs Joe Bloggs as consumers to the tune of £125 a year per household. But who will benefit? Why, middle class families, says NEA, pushing ever more lowincome consumers into fuel poverty.
OFFICIAL COMPLACENCY EXPLAINED
You would have thought that by now alarm bells would be ringing somewhere in Westminster or Whitehall, especially as the Royal Academy of Engineering, in another report, “Heat: Degrees of Comfort?”, has just told us how difficult and expensive it will be to cut domestic carbon emissions. Moreover, on January 17 the Policy Exchange think tank put the cost of the Coalition’s “excessive and unnecessary” green policies at £400 a year per household by 2020.
But there is a problem: official complacency. Energy Secretary Huhne assures us at every turn that we cannot afford to do nothing in the face of the global warming threat and that what the Government is doing will work out cheaper in the end. Now his scientific adviser, Professor David Mackay, has come up with the justification for these claims in the form of an interactive 2050 Pathway Calculator showing the consequences of taking various routes to a low carbon state at the cost of a cool £4,600 per person a year to 2050. The best buy apparently would be an electricity supply mix of 42% renewable energy, 31% nuclear and 27% gas with CCS, plus such an improvement in energy efficiency that demand for lighting and appliances would fall by 60% compared with 2007. The worst – much worse than doing nothing - would be a combination of high nuclear and less efficiency.
Unfortunately, the game has been blown apart by bloggers because of its assumptions. It is assumed that we all become frightfully efficient if we go a bundle on renewables – presumably because we shall jolly well have to, though it is not very efficient sitting freezing in the dark – rather than relying on conventional sources, including nuclear. It is, of course, a load of baloney. The Government hasn’t a clue how difficult it is to get people to economise. It also assumes CCS will work – and if you assume that you are certifiably with the fairies.
One of these days our reckless energy department will cotton on to the idea that it is there to bring security of supply at a competitive cost. When it does – and it is a long way from doing so yet – it will belatedly recognise nuclear power is desperately essential to the success of its environmental aims, too. As the CPS says, the atomic clock is ticking.
THE RUSH IS TO DEVELOP RENEWABLES, NOT NUCLEAR
Whatever the clock is doing, the world is in no hurry to go nuclear, according to BP’s Energy Outlook 2030. And judging by the leisurely pace of the UK’s approach to its development, BP is dead right.
The biggest changes in global energy usage over the next 18 years will be in renewables, including biofuels, natural gas and oil. Renewables will account for 6.3% of global supply as compared with 0.4% in 1990, and natural gas will be up from 21.8 to 25.9% over the 40 years. Oil will tumble from 38.9% in 1990 to 27.2. Nuclear will scarcely move – from 5.6 to 6%. Hydro will be marginally up from 6 to 6.8% and coal similarly from 27.3 to 27.7%.
Overall energy demand will be up 39% (1.6% annually) by 2030, almost entirely in non-OECD countries. Fossil fuels are expected to account for 81% of demand., down 6% from present levels. CO2 emissions are expected to rise by 28%, substantially less than demand. All this puts our politically correct self-flagellation in perspective.
TURBINES LASHED BY CRITICS AND GALES
This global rush into renewables looks distinctly odd after a month in the UK when wind bashing has intensified. It never really recovered after Chris Heaton-Harris, Tory MP for Daventry, used 60 adjectives to describe a planning inspector’s go-ahead for a wind farm in his constituency - “disgraceful, vulgar, disrespectful, terrible, shameful, contemptible, detestable, dishonourable, disreputable, ignoble, mean, offensive, scandalous, shabby, shady, shocking, shoddy, unworthy, deplorable, awful, calamitous, dire, disastrous, distressing, dreadful, faulty, grim, horrifying, lamentable, lousy, mournful, pitiable, regrettable, reprehensible, rotten, sad, sickening, tragic, woeful, wretched, abhorrent, abominable, crass, despicable, inferior, odious, unworthy, atrocious, heinous, loathsome, revolting, scandalous, squalid, tawdry, cowardly, opprobrious, insulting, malevolent, scurrilous and basically stinkingly poor decision”.
Scottish campaigners were less ostentatiously offended when the Scottish Executive approved a 177MW wind farm on the Glenfiddich estate. They said they had little faith in its heeding local opinion when it had turned down only 5 of the 25 50MW-plus applications over the past four years. Democracy counts for nothing in the face of the supposed need for renewable power. By contrast the New South Wales government has made it more difficult to develop in that state by giving residents within 1.25miles a veto over new wind turbines. Its new rules, described as among the toughest in the world, have also imposed a noise limit of 35 decibels.
It is reported that the National Grid paid £25m last year to wind farm operators to shut down because it could not cope with their output, thereby increasing the derision over the state of energy policy. It was so windy at the beginning of the month that it damaged three turbines in Huddersfield, one of them having all three blades sheared off.
The cost of the controversial Beauly-Denny power line in Scotland has more than doubled to £750m because of delays and landscape improvement measures demanded by the Scottish Government. The original estimate was £331m.
Meanwhile, Vestas, the major wind turbine maker, has announced up to 4,000 redundancies world wide because, curiously, of a “slowdown” in wind development and competition from China. This puts proposed projects in the UK in jeopardy.
DECC LASHED BY SONE
SONE has also been getting shirty. Your Secretary wrote to the Permanent Secretary at DECC at the beginning of the year complaining about an apparent anti-nuclear bias in its new on-line My2050 School Kit.
Our main bone of contention is the reference in the pack to the “Fukushima nuclear reactor explosion” when the disaster was not caused by an explosion but by a tsunami following a near record earthquake during which the reactors at Fukushima shut down. We have told DECC that the use of the word “explosion” increases the sense of reading from a propaganda sheet.
In another reference to nuclear – a quotation deliberately designed to provoke discussion – it says “Nuclear energy produces waste that is harmful to humans. If we are not careful with it, we could all be killed. Just look at the situation in Japan”.
Your Secretary wrote: “I fully accept that there are critical references to other sources of energy. But the quote on nuclear is gratuitous nonsense – nobody has succumbed to radiation in Japan…Oil, coal, gas, wind, waves, tides, hydropower and biomass are all potentially harmful to humans and could result in deaths. Just look at what are in some cases sadly routine events across the world”.
So far, we have had no reply to our request for amendments to a game that, of course, takes an 80% target cut in CO2 emissions by 2050 and CCS as read.
FUKUSHIMA IN PERSPECTIVE
Parliament has published the minutes of its hearing in June last year by the Commons’ Energy and Climate Change Committee on the implications of Fukushima for the UK nuclear industry. They show that Mike Weightman, the Chief Nuclear Inspector, reported that about 30 workers at the Fukushima- Daiichi plant had received between 100 and 250 millisieverts (mSv) of radiation exposure, raising their chances of contracting cancer by 1-2.5%. There did not appear to be any acute radiation effects. The International Commission on Radiation Protection is mandated to sanction a maximum accumulated dose of 250mSv in extraordinary circumstances.
Dr Weightman said the public evacuation was well organised and the IAEA mission which he led had advised the Japanese to establish a long term health monitoring programme. Another IAEA mission is to visit Japan from January 23-30 to help assess the safety of its nuclear plants.
NEW PATRONS
We are delighted to be able to announce the appointment of four new patrons for SONE.
All of them are generous supporters of nuclear power. They are Lord Vinson, Lord Clitheroe, George Nissen and Michael Payton. We thank them for lending their names publicly to the campaign for the development of nuclear power in the UK.
Last year SONE sadly lost two patrons through the deaths of Lord Walker and Lord Marsh, both former Energy Cabinet Ministers. |
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