THE REAL LITMUS TEST FOR A “GREEN” POLITICIAN: NUCLEAR POWER
Don’t you find it ludicrous, not to say alarming, that our political
leaders are engaged in a beauty contest to determine who is the
greenest of them all? It isn’t just that whatever they propose will do
next to nothing to combat global warming. They are also bent on taxing
us out of travelling.
Can you imagine a more off-putting election pledge than: “We shall introduce carbon-free holidays at home – no planes, no cars.” It is all the more preposterous since we don’t believe for one moment that the taxes will be used to improve public transport or that our leaders will forgo the use of their cars or the Queen’s Flight in the interests of reducing their carbon footprint.
The sheer hypocrisy of political greenery is underlined by the European Union. It has unilaterally agreed a mandatory 20 per cent cut (on 1990) in carbon emissions by 2020 even though hardly any of its member states will meet their Kyoto commitments by 2012. If at first you don’t succeed, promise the earth later.
Politicians think they can get away with this posturing because the lumpen proletariat have been brainwashed by unprincipled Greens, their running dogs in the political class and an hysterical media that has by now pronounced the doom of most of the world’s flora and fauna because of climate change.
But just imagine what would happen if the public believed they could have cheaper electricity with nuclear power; that their homes and their cars could be made virtually carbon free with nuclear electricity; that (as the Government has apparently discovered) wind power is nearly seven times less cost effective in reducing greenhouse gas emissions than atomic energy; and that fossil fuel usage could be substantially cut by a major nuclear power station building programme.
Just imagine, too, what they might think if they were assured that: 1) nuclear power stations are not - and never could be - nuclear bombs waiting to go off; 2) nuclear power puts 140 times less radioactivity into the atmosphere than medical treatments; and 3) that there is no problem – other than politicians – in disposing safely of highly radioactive nuclear waste.
The public are not daft. But they are too often conned by those who, for a variety of often inscrutable reasons, oppose nuclear power with militant fervour. If the people knew what we know, they would immediately make the development of nuclear power THE litmus test of a politician’s green credentials.
HOW TO SPEND £32BN
We have already spent £1.7bn on wind power. This is roughly equivalent to the cost of a modern new nuclear power station. Over the next 25 years it is estimated the UK will lavish £32bn on wind “farms” since, as things stand, wind is the only renewable, apart from fully developed hydro power, capable of producing bulk amounts of electricity.
That will by any definition be £32bn wasted. Wind power is unpredictable. The wind does not blow when we need the electricity and often blows optimally when we don’t. For this reason, Denmark is forced to dump 80 per cent of its wind power on to the European grid, which is not available to us, at knockdown prices. And an official inquiry has demonstrated that wind power contributed to a blackout across Europe last November.
If value for money and serious environmentalism rather than green tokenism controlled investment decisions, that £32bn would be spent on nuclear power. Over 25 years it could pay for around 16 modern new nuclear power stations generating reliable, continuous, cheaper and cleaner electricity. We could be simultaneously environmentally virtuous and more competitive. What are we waiting for?
IS SCEPTICISM SETTING IN?
It seems generally to be taken for granted these days that the “Greens” have won the argument. Mother Earth is warming up because homo sapiens persists in thickening its carbon duvet. Certainly, if you take any notice of the politicians and the media that is the only tale in town.
Or it was so until recently. Then the Stern report from HM Treasury and later the summary of the Fourth Report of the UN’s Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change came along. Both were preceded by orchestrated alarmism and both were attacked, if not entirely dismissed, for politicising science, whether economic or climatological.
Suddenly, the sceptics have become embolden. We are being told that we should not believe all we read in newspapers and elsewhere. Some of the critics may even believe that on balance man is responsible for warming up the planet, but they think that the protagonists are going over the top and overdoing alarmism.
Two such people, Professors Paul Hardaker and Chris Collier, of the Royal Meteorological Society, have condemned the “Hollywoodisation” of the case, and the dangers of exaggeration and crying wolf.
Riposte to Gore
A C4 television programme, The Great Global Warming Swindle, broadcast on March 8, came as a riposte to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, though it was not produced as such. The polemic, backed up by reputable scientists, cast doubt on the global warming phenomenon.
Its controversial director, Martin Durkin, said it had taken 10 years to get the film commissioned and Professor Philip Stott, emeritus professor of biogeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies, clearly hoped it would be the start of a much more open debate on global warming. “At the moment”, he said, “there is almost a McCarthyism movement in science where the greenhouse effect is like a puritanical religion. This is dangerous”.
We are not qualified to pronounce on what creates our climate – any more than, we suspect, many scientists who do are - but we believe nuclear has nothing to lose and everything to gain from an open debate. The case for nuclear power rests on greater security of electricity supply at competitive cost while reducing the use of finite fossil fuels. The fact that nuclear power produces next to no greenhouse gases is a bonus whether carbon reduction is seen as an imperative or as a form of insurance. BRING BACK BANNED BULB
The latest casualty in the Euro-rush to be green is the humble incandescent light bulb. Within two years its sale is to be banned by Europe in favour of compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs) since reputedly they require only a fifth of the electricity needed by the old sort.
This is all very fine in theory but another example – wind power and micro-generation are others - where the politicians have ignored engineers. According to Christopher Booker, (Sunday Telegraph), who has talked to them, CFLs provide a markedly poorer quality of lighting, flicker 50 times a second, take much longer to warm up, have to be run a long time to operate efficiently, need more ventilation, use mercury vapour banned by the EU from landfill sites, cost up to 20 times more than those being banned and won’t fit in most homes.
The cost could be £3bn in the UK alone. If we aren’t careful this greenery will bankrupt the lot of us.
SANITY AMID TOKENISM
We try to be fair in this Newsletter so we must have another word about the EU’s new battle for the salvation of the planet. Nuclear power will be taken into account when calculating national commitments to renewable energy.
It is no credit to the EU that this was put forward as a sop to France and the Czech Republic who insisted that nuclear, as a “non-carbon” source, should enter the calculations. Nor does it say much for Tony Blair that his pleasure at nuclear’s inclusion escaped all bar The Times’ attention, so far as we could see.
But nuclear has now been recognised, if not necessarily accepted, by Europe along with renewables as a low carbon source. Lord Sainsbury, the former UK Science Minister, described nuclear as a renewable a long time ago but he found few, if any, members of the Government rushing to endorse his judgement.
DAMNED WITH FAINT PRAISE
Subject to whatever the new Energy White Paper has to say in May, the British Government remains stronger on targets and rhetoric than remedies for the global warming it is pledged to tackle. This is apparent from the draft Climate Change Bill, which Gordon Brown described as “the world’s first ever national legislative framework for carbon management”. It was then damned with faint media praise when published on March 14.
The Bill positively bristles with targets towards the perhaps impossible dream of a 60% cut (on 1990 emissions) by 2050, even if there are 43 years to go.
There are to be five-year “binding” CO2 emission reduction targets, a statutory 26-32 per cent emissions reduction by 2020, annual reporting to Parliament and a committee on climate change to act as a whip for lackadaisical Ministers.
The Bill is, of course, only a draft, not yet included in the legislative programme – a downgrading which has caused the “Greens” to ridicule David Miliband. This was nothing compared with the mauling of Messrs Blair, Gordon Brown and Miliband by the Parliamentary sketchwriters for their ludicrous photocall on the day of publication with, inevitably, schoolchildren in a stationary “green” bus outside No 10.
We must be grateful for small mercies. In future electricity is to come “largely or wholly” from low or zero carbon sources, including wind, wave, solar, tidal and (whisper is softly) nuclear power. If the Government were serious of intent it would say nuclear would be the main source.
But that takes courage. Meanwhile, nuclear remains the “stealth” electricity to be slipped through, if developed at all, under cover of largely useless, uneconomic or undeveloped renewables, a great show of taxing individual mobility and pious hopes of creating “non-carbon homes”.
The Chancellor remained fixated on the usual ineffective measures in his eleventh and allegedly his last Budget on March 21.
WHERE RHETORIC COLLAPSED
Just a week before publication of the Climate Change Bill, The Guardian blew the gaff on the Government’s “green” performance. We offer you the evidence with some hesitation because it comes from Sir Jonathon Porritt’s Sustainable Energy Commission. As readers of SONE briefings on micro-generation will recall, we don’t think the SEC always knows what it is talking about.
Nonetheless, the SDC has analysed the performance of 21 Government departments and agencies “against targets on all aspects of green behaviour” – eg water consumption, waste reduction, use of transport and carbon emissions - and finds that “no department can make a reasonable claim to have met the requirements of all the targets assessed”. This will not come as a surprise to all those who notice the frequency with which Government departments blaze with light long after normal office hours.
Sir Jonathon said the environment was not seen as a priority in most departments. Against a target of a 12.5% cut in CO2 by 2010, 15 departments increased their emissions last year. Thirteen failed to limit their annual water use at the required level and 11 did not fulfil their pledges to cut waste. DEFRA’s rubbish, God save us, rose 19% last year. This is not calculated to encourage the populace, especially when double taxation for their rubbish collection is being canvassed.
DRAX = HUNGER
Drax, the biggest coal-fired electricity power station in Britain, reputedly the most efficient in Europe and Britain’s biggest carbon producer, is going green, no doubt under pressure from emissions trading. Having committed £100m to improve the efficiency of its turbines, it is now going to spend £67m on increasing its co-firing capacity.
It is aiming to get 10 per cent of its output from burning energy crops, such as rapeseed and elephant grass, thereby reputedly avoiding 2m of the 21m tonnes of carbon emissions it now produces.
To do this, The Independent announced on March 9, it was planning to cover an area onefifth the size of Wales or a quarter of North Yorkshire growing biofuel crops. This is equivalent to between 3-5% of the UK’s cropped land and dramatically reveals the limitations of biofuels. If 0.8% - a tenth of Drax’s share of UK power generation – requires, say, 4 per cent of arable land, a mere 8% will require 40 per cent of it.
This prompts us to ask whether biofuels are also designed to solve the obesity as well as the carbon problem. If adopted on any scale, they will almost guarantee a hungry Britain. Our tummies are already rumbling.
THE NUCLEAR STAKES
Meanwhile, Drax is immensely profitable after its brush with bankruptcy four years ago along with British Energy, thanks to the Government’s blind preoccupation at that time with crushing wholesale electricity prices through its agent, Ofgem.. It also has an open mind about the future.
In presenting its results, Drax’s chief executive, Dorothy Thompson, raised the possibility of its going nuclear if, after the Energy White Paper, the option “was value-added for the business”.
“We are alert to serious opportunities and remain aware of developments in the market”, she said.
“Nuclear falls under that statement”. Analysts later said that, if it occurred, it would probably take the form of a joint venture. According to The Times, EdF, EoN and RWE are “circling”.
The gearing up for nuclear power’s development across the world, long noticed in the buoyancy of uranium mining, is manifest. The Financial Times has noted that nuclear companies are positioning themselves to win contracts.
Total, the French energy group, says that one day it will have to be part of the nuclear adventure since access to oil and gas becomes more restricted because oil-producing nations are reluctant to allow foreign investment in their precious resource.
JPMorgan, the US investment bank, says Shell and BP – indeed “Big Oil” generally -will have to go nuclear if they wish to remain “supermajor” leaders of the global energy industry. It argues that nuclear is likely to be seen as the only effective future for the so-called hydrogen economy when power-charged fuel cells replace oil in the automotive industry.
BE AND THE SEA
We understand that British Energy has had a tremendous response to its call for partners to develop its existing nuclear sites and that its top management is responding to a wide range of interested investors.
Its coastal sites – Bradwell, Dungeness, Sizewell, Hinkley, Heysham, Hartlepool, Hunterston and Torness – have also been pronounced safe from a range of possible surges from any rise in sea levels caused by global warming.
The Met Office reported that a combination of preventative measures, including coastal defences, flood prevention and plant design would ensure the sites were well-protected.
GLOBAL PROGRESS
The number of operating nuclear power reactors across the world fell last year by six to 435 because of the closure of older plants, but installed capacity increased by 475Mwe. Two new ones, in China and India, were connected to the grid but there were closures in Spain, UK (four), Bulgaria (two) and Slovakia. Two more reactors were under construction, 25 more were planned and 45 more proposed.
UK NUCLEAR’S HISTORY
A potted history of nuclear power in the UK and its outlook by Dr Robert Hawley, vice-chancellor of the World Nuclear University and former chairman of Nuclear Electric, has been acquired for the SONE website.
The website is now attracting 14,665 visits a quarter. By far the most popular page in the final quarter of last year was the podcast interview by Dr Sue Ion, formerly BNFL, with Professor James Lovelock, a SONE patron.
CULHAM; JUNE 19
We have had a good response to news that this year’s meeting for members outside London will be at the JET fusion project at Culham on Tuesday, June 19. The management will brief SONE members, offer a buffet lunch and a tour.
For security and catering reasons, members wishing to attend should inform the Secretary on 020-8660-8970 or e-mail
NEW BRIEFINGS
Those who wish to acquire supplies of the new briefings on renewable sources of energy and the hydrogen economy should also contact the Secretary, as above.
