If the Energy White Paper (EWP) is merely an instrument to get the
Government past the next election, how are we to play the interim?
Apart from extending the lives of nuclear power stations, there is
little or nothing nuclear can now do to ease power supplies over the
next 10 years. And, on present plans, it can only contribute less
rather than more to the avoidance of greenhouse gases.
Scares
about security of supply, rising gas prices and the embarrassment of
failing to achieve Kyoto commitments may galvanise the Government. But
waiting for something to turn up is unsatisfactory. In any case, there
is much that the Government could do in the interim by way of prudent
contingency work against the possibility of shortages, uncompetitive
prices and rising pollution. We should press them to use the two years
left before an election becomes imminent to do it.
Believing that Britain’s needs and obligations cannot be met without a
substantial nuclear power industry, your committee is of the view that
we should concentrate on nuclear costs (which the EWP described as
“uneconomic”) and waste.
On costs, we must build up the case for levelling the energy market and
including nuclear power in a low carbon future. We need to paint such
anti-nuclear discrimination as the climate change levy as a whopping
inconsistency that must be eliminated. We also need to demonstrate that
technology is bringing future nuclear costs down while gas prices have
only one way to go.
On waste, we should go with the flow: the waste “problem”, real or
imagined, needs to be sorted out because of – according to anti-nukes –
the threat from terrorists, risks to health and safety and
environmental considerations. This requires the establishment of the
Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.
There are, of course, lots of other things the Government could
prudently do to safeguard the future – for example, develop a more
rational planning system for major projects. But nuclear’s waste and
costs are the priorities. We need to change people’s and the
government’s perceptions of both – and move the Government to act on
both in the national interest.
AGM – OCTOBER 22, 2003
Future strategy and moving public opinion will be the main themes of
SONE’s annual general meeting on Wednesday, October 22 at 40 Bernard
Street, London WC1 (opposite the entrance to Russell Square Tube
station), 12 noon-3pm, with buffet lunch.
The speakers will be Tony Cooper, chairman of the Nuclear Industries’
Association and a member of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority’s
progress board; and David Wild, director of corporate affairs, NIREX,
and Rick Wylie, of the Westlakes Institute, Cumbria.
For catering purposes, would all members please inform the Secretary
whether or not they intend to be present either by Tel: 020-8660-8970;
Fax: 020-8668-4357; e-maail:
The programme
for the AGM is as follows: 12-1pm – AGM business 1-1.30 – Tony Cooper
and questions 1.30-2 – Buffet lunch 2-3 – David Wild and Rick Wylie
joined by Tony Cooper for discussion.
Formal notification of the meeting will be sent to you with the annual report and accounts.
HAIL WORLD NUCLEAR UNIVERSITY
The World Nuclear University was inaugurated at the World Nuclear
Association’s annual symposium in London on September 4. Its chancellor
is Hans Blix, former UN chief weapons inspector. Its founding
supporters are the WNA, World Association of Nuclear Operators, the
International Atomic Energy Agency and the OECD’s Nuclear Energy
Agency. It has an academic council made up of 23 institutions across
the world.
The WNU’s aim is to provide a “clearing house” through the core faculty
in London “to advance co-operation between existing academic
institutions” and attract more students to facilitate a nuclear
revival. The academic council’s first task is to examine the idea of a
WNU diploma or degree and promote sharing of facilities and student
exchange programmes.
THE GARDARINE SWINE
SONE was represented at the WNU’s founding ceremony by a patron,
Professor James Lovelock CH. Speaking as an independent scientist, he
said that for 40 years he had been concerned more for the Earth than
its people because he felt that human welfare depended on the health of
the Earth’s system.
Scientists were at last beginning to recognise that the Earth behaves
like a physiological system, regulating its climate and chemical
composition so as always to be habitable for the contemporary
biosphere. But we could not expect to interfere with its mechanisms –
eg by altering its atmospheric composition – without consequences.
The most probable prediction by the International Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) – a rise of 3.5C globally this century – was about the
same as the difference in temperature between the last Ice Age and
1900, just before global warming became apparent. That was why we had
few alternatives but greatly to reduce the proportion of energy we take
from burning carbon fuel. The only sensible and practical option was to
use nuclear energy to supplement the meagre supplies of energy from
foreseeable renewable sources. After attacking “disinformation” about
nuclear dangers, which sustained a climate of ignorance and
artificially inflated the cost of nuclear energy and its waste
disposal, he said:
“The torrid heat this summer – which caused the death of more than
30,000 Europeans – was the first warning of worse to come. Business as
usual will lead us to the first devastating effects of global change.
Then we will look back and see what a vast disservice the media and
politicians had done. They gave in to false fears and failed to use the
one safe, large-scale source of energy.
“Those politicians unwise enough to preside over the closure of working
nuclear power plants will have much to answer for. Their monument will
be the spinning windmills standing like statues on Easter Island,
reminders of a failed civilisation. So let us recognise that the truly
dangerous thing we do is burning fossil carbon. For the Earth, CO2 is
one of those cumulative poisons whose consequences only become apparent
when it is too late to stop. “We are just now behaving like a new
variant of the biblical Gardarene swine – we drive our polluting cars
down to a sea that rises to drown us”.
PARLIAMENT AT WORK
The All-Party Parliamentary Group on nuclear energy – incorporating
both MPs and peers – is having a busy inaugural year. Apart from a
visit to Finnish nuclear facilities, reported in the previous
Newsletter, it has held four meetings since its inaugural gathering.
These have covered the EWP, managing radioactive waste and the Nuclear
Decommissioning Authority.
The Group is planning to go to Sellafield in November and is contemplating visits to the US Department of Energy and Brussels.
PART-TIME, SPLIT & LA RONDE
Lord Peyton of Yeovil, a former Minister of Transport, staged a
mini-debate in the Lords on September 17 which established the
following facts:
1 – Stephen Timms is part-time energy minister in the DTI with
responsibility for only part of energy as well as sustainable
development, e-commerce, the communications and information industries,
the Radiocommunications Agency, postal services, the Post Office and
corporate social responsibility. Why, asked Lord Hodgson of Astley
Abbots, should the Lords believe the Government is serious about
energy? Is it beginning to lose interest in the subject? wondered Lord
Ezra, former chairman of the Coal Board.
2 – responsibility for energy conservation has been with the Environment Department (now DEFRA) since 1992.
3 – the fledgling coal mine methane industry has not made it out of the
nest. Lord Jenkin of Roding, a former Minister for Energy, reported
having had to go round the Departmental houses – DTI, DEFRA, Treasury –
to try to help it – without result. It has gone abroad, taking its
expertise and investment with it.
Lord Peyton began it all by asking why energy policy has ceased to be
the responsibility of a single minister. He then asked Lord Sainsbury
(DTI) whether he found the “soothing syrup” of the EWP “a bit
unsatisfactory”; whether he would be entirely happy with the idea that
we imported no less than 80% of our raw material supplies for the
generation of electricity through a pipeline “as yet undesigned,
unbuilt, unfinanced, right across Europe”. Did he agree that the target
of 20% energy supply from wind was also “a bit uncertain”.
“The noble Lord could go on to lament the fact that the Government have
ignored the nuclear alternative and their shocking neglect of
research”, Lord Peyton added. “We are drifting into a very dangerous
situation”.
Lord Sainsbury lamented nothing. But SONE’s message keeps breaking through.
WHY DID THEY BOTHER?
The DTI issued in June a consultative document on the social and
environmental guidance to be given to the Gas and Electricity Markets’
Authority in the light of the EWP, published in February.
It is not a substantial document. It sets out the EWP’s four goals –
cutting CO2 emissions by 60% by 2050, maintaining the reliability of
energy supplies, promoting competitive markets and ensuring every home
is adequately and affordably heated – and then, in effect, just says
“Go, thou, and do likewise”.
With phenomenal restraint, Dr W L Wilkinson, the member of SONE’s committee handling consultative documents, has told the DTI:
“The Government’s environmental goals are certainly laudable but the
view of SONE is that the chances of their being attained with the
stated energy policy are very slim. Be that as it may, my main comment
on the guidance is that it appears to achieve nothing. It merely
reiterates the environmental objectives, states that it expects the
Authority must help to achieve them, but avoids suggesting how this
could be done”.
They should have spared the CO2-absorbent trees cut down to produce the document.
DANCING ON A PIN HEAD
Callum McCarthy, the shortly to be unlamented exchief executive of
Ofgem, the gas and electricity regulator, got shirty with The Times on
September 10 for its assertion that problems in the energy industry
stem from “the regulators’ blind insistence on....forcing down energy
prices”.
He first danced on a pin head. End consumer prices are now determined
by competition, not by regulation, he claimed, omitting to mention who
was responsible for framing the rules. He then fair took our breath way
by referring to Ofgem’s duties concerning security of supply and
investment.
What security of supply? What investment? Haven’t electricity
generators gone bust on his watch unless they have whole captive
counties of domestic consumers to milk?
One consulation for Mr McCarthy is that his regime does not seem to
have caused the power cut in London in August. It occurred in the end
because engineers had fitted a one amp instead of a five amp fuse into
a relay system. The National Grid has been checking 43,000 automatic
protection equipment systems for wrong fuses.
SUMERLING’S SHREWD STRIKE
The journal of the Institution of Electrical Engineers has invited its
members to comment for the benefit of the Lords’ Science and Technology
Committee on a series of questions including “cost effective renewable
technologies available now or likely to become available in the next 10
years”.
Roy Sumerling, a Seascale member, has responded by arguing that the
Government should be required to consider all sustainable energy
sources ensuring our energy security and not contributing to global
warming. “This”, he points out “includes nuclear power which can help
to meet our needs well into the next century”.
We call this a shrewd strike because renewables are consistently
presented as the saviour of the world to the exclusion of nuclear. SONE
members can reasonably retort that nuclear does the job better, more
reliably and cheaper.
Mr Sumerling also told the DTI the Government should show willing by
licensing new designs of fail-safe reactor and removing the climate
change levy – a tax, he says, sniffing at the “hypocrisy” of it all,
which does not apply to the 2000MW of French nuclear electricity
supplied through the Channel interconnector.
OUR WORRIED BANKERS
Last month we reported that the City was not enamoured of the idea of financing Patricia Hewitt’s vast offshore wind programme.
This month we can state they are getting the wind up about gas. The
Evening Standard has reported unidentified experts as predicting a
£4.5bn bill for imported gas within five years – as if our trade
deficit wasn’t big enough already. Last year the deficit on our trade
in goods was a record £34.3bn. Just imagine the damage if gas prices
soar.
The experts claimed the UK’s supply deficit will by 2009 be close to
half the country’s annual needs, vastly increasing the import bill.
Stand by for NationalGridTransco’s impending 10-year forecasts. How
shall we pay for this gas? And how shall we finance getting it here?
Imports will require new or reinforced pipelines and we have next to no
strategic reserve storage – 48 hours compared with France’s 70 days.
HYDROGEN – THE PRACTICALITIES
President Bush has kicked off the search for clean, hydrogen-powered
cars with a $1.2bn research fund. The core programme aims at developing
technology to support a national infrastructure for hydrogen production
and delivery to replace petroleum – the so-called FreedomFUEL
initiative.
In a recent edition of Nature, Paul Grant, a science fellow at the
Electric Power Research Institute in California, outlines the
practicalities, starting with replacing US oil consumption, equivalent
to 12m barrels of oil a day, to power surface transport. It would
require 230,000 tonnes of hydrogen a day – a gas which, incidentally,
requires more energy to extract it from its source than is recovered in
its end use.
Using electrolysis would require nearly double the existing average US
power capacity – an additional 400GW. That equates to 800 500MW natural
gas power stations, 500 800MW coal fired power stations, 200 Hoover
Dams or 100 French-type nuclear clusters of four 1000MW. The capital
cost would be at least $400bn, a fifth of US GDP. And that does not
convert the nation’s distribution and storage system from petrol to
hydrogen.
But Mr Grant points out that because of the energy density of nuclear
power the required 400GW could be generated by nuclear on land
occupying a mere 233 square kilometres. He adds:
“I believe that a resurgence of nuclear power is necessary for the
continuing industrialisation of world society with minimal
environmental impact and eco-invasion. FreedomFUEL cannot be had
without FreedomNUKES – and FreedomNUKES cannot be had in a world that
continues to permit unrestricted proliferation of nuclear weapons”.
DIRTY OLD MAN OF EUROPE
Remember SONE crossing swords with Bertie Ahern, the Irish Prime
Minister, over nuclear? Well, the statistics have caught up with him.
His Environment Minister has been forced to come clean about how dirty
the Irish really are.
It doesn’t look like it when you compare per capita CO2 emissions from
energy use.Portugal is the cleanest with 5.4 tonnes in 1998. Ireland is
just below mid-table – the same as Germany at 10.4 tonnes. Luxembourg
is astonishingly by far and away the worst at 16.8 tonnes against an EU
average of 9.3 – exactly the same as the UK figure.
But when it comes to total greenhouse gas emissions Ireland had the
highest European figure in 1999, calculated on their global warming
potential. The reason is the relatively high emissions of methane (21
times more globally warming than CO2) and nitrous oxide (310 times
more) from its agriculture.
People in middens should not strike superior poses.
THE CHEAP US OPTION
The USA’s 103 reactor units were the lowest cost electricity generators
of “any source of expandable baseload electricity” for the fourth
consecutive year last year, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute.
Production costs, covering fuel, operation and maintenance, averaged
1.71 cents per kWh.
The average nuclear fuel cost was 0.45c kWh compared with 1.3c for coal
and 3.4c for natural gas. Increased nuclear power station efficiency
has added the equivalent of 26 1,000MW power stations since 1990.
Nuclear now avoids production of 650m tonnes of CO2.
Published by: Supporters of Nuclear Energy, c/o BNES, 7 Great George Street, PO Box 25124, London SW1P 3ZS.
Tel: 020-7665-2046, Fax: 020-7665-2269
Web site: www.sone.org.uk
