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Written by SONE
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Thursday, 01 June 2006 |
WE NEED DEEDS NOT WORDS TO IMPRESS US THIS SUMMER
It now looks as if Britain is to go nuclear again. We have, of course,
heard of racing certs. many times. But all the signs, all the talk and
all the expectations are that next month (July) Tony Blair will
formally launch a new nuclear power station programme.
Why should our Prime Minister have an unexpected love-in with President Chirac at the Elysee Palace on June 9, even to the extent of forming an Anglo-French nuclear forum to bring together Ministers, businessmen and nuclear experts, if he were not intending to go nuclear, presumably with the Franco-German European reactor now being built in Finland? Why should he say people would look back in anger 20-30 years hence if today’s politicians had ducked securing future electricity supplies if he were intending to fudge? And why should Gordon Brown use The Times, that well-known Government notice-board, explicitly to endorse the decision to go nuclear if he were running away from it? He was quoted as saying: “We will demonstrate our enhanced flexibility with further reforms in planning, skills and labour markets, and in energy policy, including new nuclear”.
Others might say a surer sign was the way over recent months that Margaret Beckett, Sir Jonathon Porritt, Zac Goldsmith and now George Monbiot, in The Guardian, have trimmed their anti-nuclear sails. “To dismiss nuclear power without considering what the alternatives involve would be irresponsible”, says Monbiot, who would cut a more impressive figure if he had examined the alternatives a lot earlier.
Yet, however you read the entrails, we can all agree that a formal decision to build new nuclear power stations would be a step forward. But what we shall be looking for in the expected announcement is the programme of action to implement the decision. It is one thing to say we need more nuclear power; it is entirely another thing to set out how you propose to get it.
So what will interest us next month are Government commitments or moves – or the lack of them - to promote nuclear power (which begins with the quality of the argument in the outcome of the energy review); on the licensing and siting of new reactors; on the clarification of the terms for nuclear’s long-term access to the market; on Ofgem’s regulatory regime which has so far stifled new power station building, however fuelled; on the financial framework for the private investors; and on how long-term waste will be handled.
We shall soon know whether Blair has adequately filled out his credentials for being regarded as a statesman - as the man who did, after all, look beyond the latest headline to attend to the nation’s long-term welfare.
SORTING MEN FROM BOYS
It is clear that the Prime Minister intends to go nuclear because he has seen Britain’s energy future and knows it does not work without it. It is also implicit from his support that Gordon Brown is satisfied he will not be taken to the financial cleaners by a new generation of nuclear power stations.
This being so – and acknowledging, as did Robert Cole, in his Times business commentary of June 10, that going nuclear could have difficult political implications for them – just what is a pro-nuclear decision likely to do to the other parties? We cannot ignore their attitudes because what nuclear investors need is long-term stability of policy.
As things stand, it could leave the Tories temporarily and the Liberal Democrats permanently stranded and the Greens split, even though it is maintained that the Commons would back nuclear power on a free vote.
Conservatives equivocal The Conservatives are conducting their own reviews in which Vote Green/Blue David Cameron, John Selwyn Gummer (with Sizewell in his constituency), the viscerally anti-nuke Zac Goldsmith (as Gummer’s deputy on the quality of life review) and Alan Duncan, Shadow Industry Minister, have important fingers in the pie.
Duncan seems to spend his time carping about Blair “totally pre-empting” the Government’s review – no doubt because he has also preempted his own examination of the energy problem. This nuclear-sceptic is on record as saying he does not think his party could go against the grain of public opinion which he obviously assumes to be against nuclear power.
On June 9 The Guardian reported his views as being against any guaranteed price or fixed quota for nuclear power on the grid and questioning whether uranium will come from secure sources in the medium term and whether the industry has a long-term solution to waste disposal. In short, he is profoundly sceptical.
Meanwhile, Peter Ainsworth, the Tories’ antinuke Shadow Environment Secretary, resolutely refuses even to discuss his inaccurate impressions of nuclear power with your Secretary. He wants no truck with those with “closed minds and open mouths”. This is a bit rich since it all started with your Secretary objecting to what came out of his open mouth. We have obviously yet to explore his mind.
No doubt part of Blair’a calculation is that a pronuclear energy review will cast the Conservatives into confusion and split the leadership from the majority of their rank and file MPs. His pronuclear noises have certainly made it harder for Tory reviews.
Liberals gung-ho for micro On June 20 Sir Menzies Campbell, Liberal Democrat leader, dismissed nuclear as uneconomic – “the ultimate stealth tax”, he said inventively - and went a bundle on de-centralised micro-generation. His environment spokesman, Chris Huhne, took a column in The Guardian the same day to shoot nuclear down as “a tried, tested and failed technology” and similarly to go for micro-generation and CHP.
Greenpeace went down much the same route with a full page advertisement in the so-called quality press purporting to announce the results of its energy review. The case was thoroughly dishonest. It failed to recognise one limitation of CHP – it may be fine for new buildings but how do you get it economically into existing ones? Greenpeace claimed that an economic model used by the Government concluded that a decentralised electricity system would cost considerably less than upgrading a centralised one with new nuclear power stations and that our energy bills would be cheaper. This model does not seem to have impressed Messrs Blair and Brown.
Last word We have noted before that Professor Sir David King, the Government’s chief scientific adviser, is a pretty reliable weathercock to Labour thinking. He seems to reflect the energy mood.
So, take heart. He is now saying nuclear should supply 30 per cent of Britain’s electricity, and, according to The Guardian, even 40 per cent.
We don’t want to spoil the party, but why 30, 40, 50 or whatever percentage you care to quote when the market is supposed to decide. France has demonstrated there is plenty of scope for nuclear with 83 per cent of its electricity generated by uranium.
COMPETITIVE OR NOT?
Well, is nuclear economic? The Financial Times told us mid-month that, in ruling out financial incentives, the Prime Minister will make a commercial case for nuclear power in unveiling the energy review. Whitehall officials say he will draw on an internal economic analysis that suggests nuclear is more cost-effective than coal or gas, coming close to industry projections of £24/MWh, including decommissioning.
This study has been peer reviewed, we are told, and discussed with the Treasury. Soaring gas prices and the rising cost of carbon make construction, operation and decommissioning of nuclear plants attractive.
Guillaume Dureau, strategy director for AREVA, the French reactor builder, has confirmed the £24/MWh estimate. Areva’s UK representative, Robert Davies, told The Guardian that most international studies show nuclear can compete with gas even before carbon costs are taken into account. What is more, those studies were completed before gas prices quadrupled.
Decommissioning, he added, was not a financial obstacle. Costs could be met over the 60-year lifespan of a plant and the costs of decommissioning Magnox and AGR stations bore no comparison with those for the decommissioning of modern plants. The UK’s old reactor fleet was never built to be taken apart; new designs are.
Bill Coley, British Energy’s chief executive, also said on June 20 that nuclear power stations are economically viable without Government guarantee or subsidy.
Malcolm Wicks, Energy Minister, is bullishly on record. He told The Guardian on June 14: “The key players in the market are telling us that they need some clarity about carbon so that we incentivise clean forms of energy that reduce emissions. I am confident that if they get that they will come forward and invest. Whether it is in nuclear or something else will essentially be a commercial judgement”.
This begs the question as to what else is clean and can compete?
MONBIOT’S CONCESSIONS
What arguments against nuclear are left to the anti-nukes? We ask because George Monbiot has retreated on so many fronts. He concedes · another Chernobyl is highly unlikely · it looks as if radioactive waste can be stored safely · global supplies of uranium are not a limiting factor · nuclear power is less dangerous than climate change · beyond a certain point, power from renewables cannot be guaranteed.
So if nuclear is safe, secure, reliable and has no insoluble waste problem – and is economic, though he has his doubts on that – what are we arguing about? It comes down to this: nuclear can deliver large amounts of clean electricity at a reasonable price; ergo, it can keep the existing system going. But the Greens and anti-nukes don’t want to maintain existing lifestyles. They don’t want investment in nuclear because they think it will crowd out investment in renewable sources of energy and energy efficiency and more localised distribution systems. They want to change the world and safe, reliable, clean and economic nuclear gets in the way. So it must be stopped.
This argument is implicit or explicit in publicity from the Sustainable Energy Commission, the Environment Agency, the Liberal Democrats and Greenpeace. It is the recipe for a poorer, unemployed, uncompetitive Britain. The people should be told.
THE COMING WINTER
Alastair Darling, the new Industry Secretary, says energy supplies this coming winter will be “tight”. The National Grid says they may be tighter than last winter when shortages of gas, partly through the failure of Continental monopolies to supply us, raised British prices to world record levels and cost the consumer £1bn.
Ofgem, the regulator, says there is no room for complacency and has sent an official to assess the Continental position. If it does not improve the UK cost could treble to £3bn next winter.
This demonstrates the failure of energy policy over recent years – the failure: · to anticipate the rundown of North Sea gas; · to provide new pipelines and gas storage; · of the regulatory regime to look beyond immediate prices; · to liberalise the EU’s energy market; · of UK regulators to look beyond short-term prices to the adequacy of spare electricity generating capacity.
There is not a lot that nuclear can do about this short-term mess. But there is everything it can do about increasing longer-term security of supply of both electricity and other fuels (by reducing demand for them). The Prime Minister seems to have grasped that point.
LOVELOCK’S LITTLE WARMER
We do not expect Mr Blair will grasp Professor James Lovelock’s answer to winter chills: warm your house with nuclear waste. SONE’s patron raised eyebrows at the Cheltenham Science Festival when he said: “I have offered to take the full [waste] output of a nuclear power station in my backyard. I would be glad to have it. I would use it for home heating. It would be a waste not to use it.” He lives in an old mill on the lovely Devon/ Cornwall border and claims his neighbours are enthusiastic supporters - “they are all farmers and have got a strong sense of the value for money”.
He also recognises the limitations of his idea.
“One can just imagine putting in for planning permission to store high level nuclear waste”.
We can since, as he says, the Greens have “built up a miasma of fear” about nuclear waste which reaches deep down into the nation. But we are grateful to Professor Lovelock for confronting head on that “miasma of fear” and ridiculing it.
TELLING IT STRAIGHT
Professor W L Wilkinson, a member of SONE’s committee has responded with some straight talking to the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management’s invitation to comment on its recently published draft recommendations.
He welcomed CoRWM’s main recommendation of staged geological disposal as the main option for high and some categories of intermediate level waste and its recognition that some decommissioning wastes might be disposed of on-site to avoid the vast and unnecessary cost of removal and transport.
“However”, he adds, “these recommendations are not new. They have been arrived at over the past two years at considerable cost to the public purse and they merely mirror the strategy which the nuclear industry has been following for the past 25 years”.
Professor Wilkinson regrets CoRWM’s has made little use of cost-benefit analysis; points to the need for a more balanced membership of CoRWM, particularly to cover science and technology; and says CoRWM should not recommend specific forms of geological disposal because it does not have the technical and economic expertise.
AWKWARD QUESTIONS
We are delighted to see that one of our members, Lord Vinson is asking some awkward questions about the activities of publicly funded bodies impacting on the nuclear scene.
Is the Carbon Trust, he asks in a series of Parliamentary Questions, now preparing to promote nuclear power to help build a low carbon economy since the Prime Minister says nuclear power “is back on the agenda with a vengeance”.
Who, he wonders, funds Sir Jonathon Porritt’s Sustainable Development Commission which has been hostile to nuclear, how many staff does it employ and where are they located.
Will the Government renew Professor Gordon McKerron’s chairmanship of CoRWM in view of his (anti-nuclear) articles in the press? We can’t wait for the sleight of words in reply.
THIS NUCLEAR WORLD
Just a few facts compiled by the World Nuclear Association. By the end of the first quarter of this year there were 27 reactors (21,361 MWe) under construction across the world. 38 (39,557 MWe) were planned; and 113 (82,220 MWe) proposed.
There were then 441 reactors in operation.
According to the WNA the leading nuclear countries are: France (78%, though its industry claims 83% of electricity so generated); Lithuania 72%; Belgium and Slovakia 55%; Sweden 52%; Ukraine 51%; Bulgaria 42%; Switzerland 40%; Armenia 39%;Slovenia and South Korea 38%; Hungary 34%; Germany 32%; and Japan 29%. The USA has 20% and the UK 19%.
NUCLEAR PETITION
The cross-union Nuclear Workers’ Campaign has mounted a petition to the Government seeking “a secure and balanced energy policy made, where possible, in Britain”. It says: “We believe such a policy should be based on three main energy pillars: new replacement nuclear; new clean coalfired technology; and renewables.
THANKS
We are grateful to all those who have sent us their recent efforts to fertilise an often ill-informed energy debate in the media with facts – Allan Shaw, Norwich; Graham Brightman, St Bees; Dr Peter Hodgson, Emeritus Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford; Dr Johnny Ball, Chilterns, for his radio and print work to correct false impressions of nuclear stemming from Chernobyl’s 20th anniversary; Professor Jack Simmons, a member of SONE’s committee; Derek Limbert, Beaconsfield; Roy Sumerling, Cumbria; and Terri Jackson, Bangor, Northern Ireland? DEATHS We regret to record the deaths of stalwart members – the Earl of Lonsdale and the Rt Hon Lord Gray of Contin, a former Minister for Energy.
AGM, October 24
We are pleased to announce that one of the speakers at SONE’s annual general meeting on Tuesday, October 4, will be Professor Michael Laughton, of Imperial College, London, who will give us an engineer’s view of energy policy. The meeting will be held at the Royal Academy of Engineering, 29 Great Peter Street, London SW1 from noon to 3pm (coffee 11.30, and buffet lunch, 1.30). |
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 12 September 2006 )
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