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Written by SONE
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Monday, 01 January 2007 |
A CENTURY WE WOULD RATHER NOT HAVE SCORED
This is the 100th edition of the Newsletter. Some members may well
think we ought to have celebrated the milestone in a glossier way. We
take the view that there is not enough to celebrate yet when we only
have words, not a new nuclear power station building programme.
One hundred editions of a narrowly-focused journal represent only a token of SONE’s effort to shift opinion in favour of a common sense energy policy that employs the cheapest and environmentally cleanest electricity generating option that would bring much greater security to electricity supply and minimise the use of fossil fuels.
Breaking the curious hold that militant (and unprincipled) “Greens” have on the body politic is obviously a major task when the pro-nuclear forces tend to run a mile from robust debate expressed in basic English so that all may understand. Arguments are not won by being nice, gentle and wet but by telling inconvenient truths in an arresting way and standing no nonsense from propagandists.
It is, of course, true that at last the Government has acknowledged that nuclear has a singular role to play in energy policy along with other low carbon sources. We like to think that SONE has played some part in this significant U-turn. It is a pity that the opposition parties (as distinct from MPs generally who, polls tell us, are substantially pro-nuclear) do not share Labour’s new realism. We await a White Paper this Spring to see what the Government’s new-found nuclear support adds up to. We hope that it does not hold out the prospect of another 100 editions of this Newsletter.
SONE was formed in 1998 because it was recognised that, with privatisation, nuclear power might want for champions. We deliberately chose to remain a group of individuals – no corporate members – even though that would limit resources. We preferred the flexibility that the independence of individuals brought. Over the past nine years, we have been loyally and generously supported by members who have regularly corrected opponents’ fantasies in the media. It is clear that they have recognised this is a long haul.
Our objective from the first was to work ourselves out of a job. We shall have succeeded when there is no need for SONE or its Newsletter. We look forward to that day – and soon - for then we can be sure that the national interest is being served.
LET’S TAKE HEART
The past month has brought a timely crop of scares that have surely reinforced the need for nuclear power as well as another tremendous demonstration by British politicians of their firm grasp of inessentials.
Let us look on the bright side first. The European Commission unveiled An Energy Policy for Europe and Mr Putin staged a repeat performance of his use of energy as a winter bullying instrument – this time of Belarus – thereby briefly depriving Western Europe of part of its oil supplies.
The EU (which is performing abysmally against the CO2 reduction standard set by Kyoto) warned that global warming was so catastrophic that it could trigger regional conflicts, poverty, famine and migration. It forecast severe impacts on some ecosystems, a decline in global food production and the spread of infectious diseases such as malaria and dengue fever.
It wants a 30% cut in CO2 by 2020 but also recognises the contribution nuclear energy makes to security of supply, climate change and competitiveness. Nuclear power, it says, is:
a) one of the largest sources of CO2-free energy in Europe;
b) less vulnerable to fuel price changes than coal or gas because uranium represents a limited part of the total cost of generating nuclear electricity and has widely-distributed sources sufficient for many decades; and
c) is “one of the cheapest sources of low-carbon energy currently produced in the EU and the next generation of reactors should reduce those costs further”.
Foratom, the European nuclear body, welcomed all this and said: “Among major energy sources, nuclear is the key to helping get the EU’s security of supply and climate change objectives back on track.” So far as the EC is concerned, nuclear, it seems, is a good thing.
Mr Putin’s problem – and ours
Europe got on its high horse over Mr Putin and Angela Merkel, German Chancellor and current EU president, said his behaviour was “unacceptable”. The problem is that Mr Putin keeps showing that he is about as subtle a diplomat as a bull in a china shop.
Mrs Merkel also let it be known that she thinks the German policy of phasing out nuclear power by 2020 is nuts, but unfortunately she is in bed politically with the SDP who nuttily regard an eventually nuclear-free Germany as an article of faith. We look forward to Mrs Merkel winning a review of the policy – and remaining in office.
POLITICAL FLATULENCE
Looking on the dark side, we have been treated to some amazingly irrelevant stuff by British politicians. First, there was an unhealthy crossparty preoccupation with bovine flatulence. This determination to eliminate the 1m tonnes of methane a year said to be emitted by our national cattle herd seemed rather hard on the British Friesian, bearing in mind all the bovine methane emitted in the Serengeti, Tsavo and Kruger national parks, not to mention Australia, New Zealand and the whole of South America.
No matter, DEFRA (which can’t run a simple farm subsidy scheme) is on the case. It is looking at methane trading for farmers – but how do you measure what a herd produces? – and is spending £750,000 on investigating how changing animal feed could make cattle less windy.
Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrats’ environment spokesman, let loose the following immortal line. “Flatulent livestock emitting methane are beyond a joke. Farming is in the front line of the battle against climate change”.
Has nobody told him that Sizewell A and Dungeness A, two Magnox stations, closed this New Year on grounds of age, avoided without any fuss 160m tonnes of CO2 over their lifetimes?
Offsetting – the new toy
Mr Blair, under pressure because of his family’s sizeable carbon footprint after a holiday with a Bee Gee in Florida, promised to offset it by planting trees or contributing to any one of the world’s 57 different varieties of carbon absorption scheme. He could not have chosen a worse time.
First, we were told that planting forests to combat global warming may be a waste of time. US scientists reckon trees cool the planet only in the tropics; in our high latitudes they trap heat near the ground and warm it.
Then we learned that this offsetting business could well be populated by cowboys. Tim Yeo, Tory chairman of the Commons’ environmental audit committee, promptly announced an inquiry into it. This seemed an unusually sensible approach until he was reported as wanting to tax domestic British airlines out of existence.
This prompts two questions: 1 - do politicians engage their brains any more before they speak?; and 2- why, if climate change is such a crisis that we must interfere with cow, sheep and horse digestive systems, don’t these same politicians build real carbon savers such as nuclear power stations? Probably because they can’t see the biomass for the trees.
WASTE INFLATION
SONE members will be very unsurprised to hear that inflation in the costs of nuclear waste disposal is rampant. At a recent debate at the Carlton Club on “There is no alternative to new nuclear build” (no vote taken), a Greenpeace spokesman put the cost of dealing with the British nuclear waste legacy at £140bn – repeat £140 billion.
This represents inflation of Weimar proportions.
Indeed, it might accurately be measured as a doubling overnight. The highest stab so far from the Nuclear Decommissioning Agency is £70bn.
But that figure is scarcely credible, judging by the calculations of SONE members, when: 1 – the NDA is charged with promoting competition to secure efficiency and economy in decommissioning and waste disposal; and 2 – its calculations assume the return of most nuclear sites to greenfield status – a daft notion, if ever there was one, if the nuclear power industry is to be developed on existing sites.
FLOWERS BLOOMS
In the mid-1970s Lord Flowers, in a Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution report, controversially advised that “there should be no commitment to a large programme of nuclear fission power until it has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that a method exists to ensure the safe containment of long-lived highly radioactive waste for the indefinite future”.
Ever since then this has been used by the antinukes as a reason for eliminating the nuclear power option. It will no longer wash. Indeed, it has not been serviceable since January 12, 2005.
Lord Flowers then explained why in a Lords’ debate.
He said the advice was given to make the nuclear industry take waste disposal seriously. Thirty years later new reactors produce much less waste and are much more competitive and reprocessed waste is being vitrified in containers to protect it from the environment.
“Fourthly, a method to ensure safe disposal for the indefinite future – namely underground storage – has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt in other countries, especially Finland. The same can be done here, now that we know the method exists”.
Lord Flowers added: “…For too long much of the world has turned away from nuclear power in favour of the large-scale burning of oil and gas as well as coal, and of grossly inflated estimates of the availability of so-called renewable energy. In those circumstances, resolving the remaining issues of nuclear waste disposal and deciding on the precise procedures that will be adopted in this country must no longer be presented, as the [then] Minister, Mr Morley, did to us, as a ‘prerequisite’ for deciding in principle the future of nuclear power in this country”.
THE CHEEK OF IT
Tony Baldry, Tory MP for Banbury, is going about drawing on his experience as a Junior Minister in the Department of Energy in the early 1990s and concluding from it that David Cameron is right in making nuclear “a last resort”. He has obviously never read Lord Flowers (Col 331-332, Hansard).
His experience of being unable to privatise nuclear power stations at the first go leads him to conclude that the private sector won’t back the technology. He seems to forget that British Energy was later privatised.
Second, he says that he was a frequent visitor to BNFL Sellafield and was repeatedly told that new developments for the disposal of nuclear waste were around the corner.
Seventeen years later, he says, things do no seem much further forward. How true. And why? Because politicians, among whom Mr Baldry is numbered, won’t designate a site for a depository.
He also overlooks the incarceration of nuclear waste in glass blocks, cement and bitumen and the fact that John Selwyn Gummer MP rejected a plant for a depository at Sellafield at the fag end of the Major Government.
Talk about motes and beams!
NEW YEAR FOLLIES
Lord Flowers’ reference to “grossly inflated” estimates of the availability of renewable energy were embarrassingly impressed upon the BBC just before Christmas. In its enthusiasm for this green tokenism, BBC South chose to report the go ahead for the world’s largest offshore wind farm in the Thames Estuary against the background of Ecotricity’s 2MW turbine at Reading.
It announced that the programme would be powered entirely by the turbine only to find that the wind disobligingly failed to blow. It had to use an emergency generator.
Curiously, the Scots seem to be oblivious to the vagaries of the weather in their enthusiasm for becoming a carbon-free nation. The Scottish Executive is to make available to all secondary school pupils Al Gore’s global warming film An Inconvenbient Truth. Ross Finnie, Environment Minister, dismissed the idea that the film was propagandist and said that anyone disputing climate change “has got to be on Planet Mars”.
Sir Ranulph Finnes, the famous explorer, has not yet got quite that far. But he has called on the Scottish Executive to scrap its renewables targets because it is wrecking the country’s landscape with wind turbines.
Finally, let us beware of these egalitarian ideas for all of us to be given a carbon allocation by which to conduct our lives (with, of course, the option to buy a bigger one if you are rich). The World Development Movement has just informed us that only eight days into January we filthy Brits had emitted as much carbon as a poor Zambian does in an entire year.
So, to allow the Zambians to prosper (if only their Government would let them) how much CO2 would they be allowed? And by how much would we have to decline economically to save the planet? When it is put like that, selling nuclear power will become as easy as flogging hot cakes.
AREN’T STATISTICS WONDERFUL
There has been a bit of a kerfuffle because the wind industry is claiming that it came within a whisker of hitting Government targets in 2005. It certainly did if you regard 95 per cent achievement missing by a whisker.
But what does it mean? Well the Government’s target for wind power generation is 30 per cent of a turbine’s rated capacity. Given that the Renewable Energy Foundation gives the average load factor for 2005 as 28.4 per cent, then the industry did indeed come within five per cent of the target.
But…the capital cost of wind power per unit of installed capacity is a bit more than that needed for a fossil fuelled plant. Run as baseload, a fossil fuel plant would achieve a load factor of 90 per cent. So the capital cost of achieved megawatt hour of wind power is more than three times that of conventional generation. And, of course, wind’s 30 per cent load factor varies continuously (and steeply up and down) and the Germans have warned of the grid control problems this can cause.
CONDOLENCES
We regret to record the deaths of two stalwarts of the nuclear industry and valued SONE members – Paul Wolff, of Northwich, and W L (Bill) Tyson, of Cheadle, both of Cheshire. Mrs Barbara Tyson has taken over her husband’s membership.
NEW BRIEFING NOTES
We expect to be able to circulate to members two more SONE briefing notes next month – one on renewable sources of energy and the other on the concept of a hydrogen economy. Others are in course of preparation and we hope to publish them soon. An article by the Secretary on the prospects for nuclear power this year is circulating on the NucNet.
CHAIRMAN’S APPEAL
We are delighted to announce that the chairman’s appeal for a replenishment of SONE’s funds has now brought in £6,585 from 130 members. It is a magnificent response to an appeal which has given SONE a new lease of life and remains open.
A CAUTIONARY TALE
On this 100th anniversary we have tried to temper a sense of achievement by keeping our feet on the ground. It is, however, only fair to report that we are struck by the confidence around the energy scene that the big players such as EdF, Eon and RWE will invest in British nuclear power. People don’t say this publicly, but our conversations tend to be punctuated by nods and winks.
Recognising that there is still a lot to be sorted out, with a White Paper to come, our response remains: If so, why don’t they get on with it? A commitment in principle would transform the scene.
We must point out that this sort of talk reached the Mail on Sunday in mid-January last year - yes, 2006. It then reported that EdF was ready to invest in a series of nuclear plants, using the European PWR, and that, when the Government decided to go for what was described as “a balanced energy policy”, Eon and RWE would also enter the lists. The Government has since rebalanced its energy policy.
All this perhaps shows how crucial is the 2007 White Paper.
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