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Text of speech by Sir Bernard Ingham |
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Written by Sir Bernard Ingham
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Monday, 12 December 2005 |
Text of speech by Sir Bernard Ingham. Secretary, Supporters Of Nuclear
Energy (due to have been delivered – but was not since the lunch did
not take place) at the ENERGY INDUSTRIES LUNCH, Dec 12, 2005
Thank you inviting me to this seasonal lunch of the Energy Industries
Club. There could not be a more topical time to talk about energy than
now.
The Government is up to its eyes in energy reviews. David Cameron is up
to his eyes in the environment – and therefore energy - because he
thinks there are young votes in it and promises to get it all wrong
with Zac Goldsmith advising him.
With notable exceptions, the Liberal Democrats have always been wrong on energy and are likely to remain so.
If Goldsmith advising Cameron is not quite as bad as Jonathon Porritt
and Professor Gordon McKerron advising Tony Blair, it’s bad enough.
But then we live in barmy times when the world, assembled in Montreal,
agrees to talk more at enormous expense in cash and greenhouse gases
about new targets for carbon reduction when hardly anybody will come
within shouting distance of the old targets.
I propose to speak plainly today about the mess that is energy policy in the UK.
In fact, we do not have an energy policy. We have an environmental
policy – aiming at a 60% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050 – to which
energy policy is subjugated.
This is official and political incompetence that is dangerously
damaging to the interests of this nation – as I pointed out in February
2003 within the hour of the last Energy White Paper being issued.
Energy policy should be first and foremost about obtaining maximum
security of energy supplies at an affordable - competitive – cost. As
of now, it achieves neither since it cannot do so by the chosen means
set out in 2003 – renewables, energy conservation and natural gas. Nor
is it reducing carbon emissions.
Yet every energy magazine I come across is besotted with renewables,
even though there is only one (apart from fully developed
hydro-electricity) capable of producing commercial electricity – namely
wind.
I am frequently criticised in the nuclear industry for dismissing wind
as useless and irrelevant. After all, they say, it is no competitor.
Indeed, it isn’t. But that does not make it useful and relevant.
You cannot run a modern economy on unreliable, uncontrollable wind
power – as the Irish discovered, once they got round to consulting
their engineers. They stopped further wind connections to the grid
because they did not have enough stand-by generating plant.
Nor can you effectively reduce carbon emissions with wind power because
of the need for fossil-fuelled power stations to chip in when the wind
doesn’t blow or blows too hard.
As for wind power being competitive – go tell that to the Marines, as
more than one Parliamentary Select Committee has confirmed. It is
eyewateringly expensive before even you count the cost of connecting up
the remote sites where it is generated with the consumer. Two or three
times the cost of nuclear which does REDUCE carbon emissions.
Wind-powered Denmark has the dearest electricity in Europe and the
Germans are extremely restive when six per cent of their electricity
(from wind) accounts for 13% of their electricity costs.
Wind turbines reflect not the wind’s 21stC potential but the extent to
which environmental campaigners with not the slightest concern for the
countryside have provided pathetically gullible politicians with a
Green token.
And so, not to put too fine a point on it, wind farming is cynical subsidy farming.
As for the rest of renewables – waves, tides, solar, geothermal,
photo-voltaics, biofuels, waste etc – they are either marginal,
unproven, unpromising, uncosted, a gleam in the eye or even idle
dreams. They cannot provide a secure energy future at affordable cost.
It is time energy institutions, clubs and their editors came off Cloud 9 and got down to practical power.
Meanwhile, energy conservation is presented as a means of avoiding the
construction of power stations, even though electricity demand has been
rising by 1-1.5% a year for decades.
Ever since I spent five years in the D/Energy in the 1970s promoting
energy saving, we’ve been trying to cut out waste, and been insulating
and installing controls etc. And still electricity demand goes up. It
goes up in spite of all the excellent and continuing work of
scientists, engineers and technologists in improving the efficiency of
plant, machinery and appliances.
The truth is that energy conservation is to reduced electricity demand
what the gold in the sea was to the Nazis seeking to finance world
domination. It may well be there in practice as well as in theory, but
it is damned difficult to secure even if cost is no objection.
So, two of the props of the Government’s current so-called energy
policy are collapsing. The third – gas – is not a prop at all if your
objective is security of supply at affordable cost. Anybody who would
rely for gas – as we must since North Sea production is falling - on
Russia, the Islamic states, the Middle East generally, Algeria and
Nigeria needs certifying.
These states may well have a vested interest in selling their oil and
gas and in fulfilling contracts. But the other objective of energy
policy is affordable cost. And nobody knows what the price of imported
gas will be in the future – except that it will be expensive with China
and India, with 2.4bn people to raise up, scouring the world for
supplies.
So where do we go from here? Well, as things stand we see the
progressive closure of coal and nuclear power stations supplying just
over half of our electricity. Coal for environmental reasons. Nuclear
for ideological reasons. And we have no means whatsoever of replacing
that capacity other than with gas.
So, coal is in come-back mode. Clean coal technology is all the rage.
Well, up to now clean coal technology has meant eliminating sulphur
emissions at enormous expense. It has not meant reducing coal’s
formidable carbon emissions.
But, hey presto, we suddenly discover we are going to siphon off all
the C02 from our power stations and inject it into the strata under the
North Sea. Well, it will no doubt help us to produce more oil and gas
to produce more carbon emissions. But nobody knows whether it will stay
there in the permeable rock strata or what the cost of getting it there
will be. Earliest estimates suggest it could double the price of
electricity.
This would be a very high price to pay for producing more fossil fuels
while at the same time failing to reduce much industrial or any
domestic and transport CO2 which represents about 40% of the total.
I sometimes think that the energy industries generate more crackpots – or conmen - than Watts.
So where does that leave us? Well, we could wreck the economy. If we
persevere with the Ofgem wholesale electricity market regime we can be
pretty certain we shall. This short-term market control mechanism has
already brought electricity generation – coal, oil and gas as well as
nuclear - to the brink of bankruptcy. It now militates against the
construction of any power station.
The result is that it is touch and go in a cold winter whether we can
keep the home fires burning, commerce turning over the cash and
industry operational.
And it will get worse rather than better as the years progress unless
something is done - as the Institution of Civil Engineers has pointed
out.
So shall we come to our senses and go critical? That is, develop the
nuclear power industry which has proved its ability to deliver baseload
electricity over half a century.
Don’t count on it. The political parties are stuffed with anti-nuke CND
peaceniks, environmental nutters whose concern for the environment
falls far short of their determination to kill capitalism and idealists
who would impose their idea of the good life on the rest of us.
It is true that these people are on the retreat and conducting a
rearguard action. Broadly speaking, they think there are three elephant
traps for nuclear: its economics; its safety and security; and its
waste. Their secondary obstacles are an alleged shortage of uranium
and, they claim, nuclear’s carbon muckiness.
There is no evidence of a shortage of uranium since supply depends on
demand and price. The more the demand the higher the price – and the
more exploration in predominantly stable democracies. As for nuclear’s
carbon content, the Government’s own Energy Technology Support Unit
long ago showed that its life-cycle carbon output per unit of generated
electricity is lower even than wind.
What you will find on nuclear economics is that every opponent gives
credit for future improvements in fuel economics to every means of
generation bar nuclear. This is, of course, a totally incredible stance.
A number of studies – and not just the Royal Academy of Engineering’s
but also British Energy’s operations – suggests that nuclear’s costs
fall between 2 and 3p per kWh, with an emphasis on the lower end of
that range. If that is so – and the RAE put it at 2.3pkWh against gas’s
2.2pkWh – then nuclear is now the cheapest option, given the rise in
gas prices, especially as it includes in its price a 4-5% allowance for
decommissioning and waste management. No other fuel takes account of
its environmental consequences in its price.
It is true that nuclear’s costs are very heavily front-end loaded and
that this could be an obstacle. Indeed, it is an obstacle so long as
palsied Government fails to identify nuclear as a national need.
But a Government statement that nuclear is necessary in the national
interest would change the entire outlook since it would require the
Government to facilitate its development.
Nuclear is not looking for a subsidy, as I was obliged to tell one
arrogant senior Opposition politician in the most forcible terms. But
it is entitled to Government help in the form of setting in process the
licensing of reactors for use in the UK; in identifying sites for new
reactors; in defining the planning regime; in clarifying the terms of
nuclear’s market access; in removing nuclear’s ludicrous liability to
pay the so-called climate change levy; and in identifying a site for
the disposal of long-term nuclear waste.
It is not the market that militates against nuclear; it is the
Government. And it does so wilfully. To argue that nobody is queuing up
to build a nuclear power station is perhaps the ultimate in cynical
disingenuousness.
Would you join a queue to build a nuclear power station when so many questions remain unanswered by the Government?
On safety and security, the anti-nukes try to terrify the population
with threats of nuclear terrorism as if every nuclear power station
would go up in a cloud of radiation if only someone would light the
right touch paper.
The only reason terrorists might fly a plane into a nuclear power
station would be to create anti-nuke-induced panic as distinct from
death, given the thickness of the containment vessel. If they want
death and destruction, a Saturday afternoon football stadium would
better fit their psychotic bill.
Second, as a form of electricity generation, nuclear is the safest yet
devised by man. Not a single death from a radiation accident in 50
years’ operation in the UK. Just think of the scores of deaths in a
good year in the coal mining industry.
Finally, on waste, there is only one obstacle in the way of disposing
of the long-life wastes. Yes, it is the Government again. We’ve been
storing waste from defence and civil operations for well over half a
century. What ideally we should do now is to treat it, some of the heat
having dissipated, and find a longer-term store for it.
The problem of creating a store is not scientific, engineering,
technical or cost – however hard the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority
tries to gold plate and diamond stud the process; it is political.
And look who is playing politics with it. Why Professor Gordon
McKerron, chairman of the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management,
which is supposed to recommend a way of dealing with long term waste
next July, has just signed an anti-nuclear article in the Observer.
You couldn’t make it up – as we said when Chief Constables campaigned
at the Government’s behest for a 90-day detention without charge for
suspected terrorists. Where do public servants put their impartiality
these days?
Over the coming year we shall discover whether the Government and the
Opposition – in this post-Punch and Judy era of politics – want to
develop an energy policy in the national interest or act the goat with
prejudiced and ignorant environmentalists.
Don’t put your money on a rational approach requiring a mix of energy sources, including a substantial nuclear element.
But one thing you should do as responsible energy industry
practitioners is to expose the facts and the myths in the arguments. If
you don’t, you will be complicit in the damage that current energy
policy is storing up for the country – its economy, its prosperity, its
jobs and its social well-being.
You have been warned.
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 14 December 2005 )
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