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Written by SONE
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Tuesday, 01 May 2007 |
THE HALTING, STUTTERING ROUTE TO SECURITY AND CLEANLINESS
On the face of it, we have regressed. In July last year the
Government’s energy review concluded that new nuclear power stations
could make “a significant contribution to meeting our energy policy
goals”. Less than a year later its White Paper, published on May 23,
states “The Government’s preliminary view is that it is in the public
interest to give the private sector the option of investing in new
nuclear power stations”.
The apparent backsliding is to be explained by Greenpeace, which won a judge’s condemnation of the Government’s consultation process. So this time the Government is treading carefully, even to the point of underlining that its preparations for a nuclear future are contingent upon a 20-week consultation.
In this halting way, two steps forward, one step backwards, we proceed towards securing our energy future and reducing carbon emissions. It will be amazing if we do, especially as few seem to understand the enormity of the investment required to secure our electricity supply and the changes needed to reduce our carbon emissions by 60 per cent (on 1990) by 2050.
Of course, the latest White Paper still puts the cart before the horse in its concentration on environmental goals and the heroically optimistic ways of achieving them – renewables, microgeneration, energy conservation etc – rather than focusing on security of supply at competitive cost in the cleanest way possible. This is inevitable given the current political mindset that afflicts all parties.
But SONE’s arguments are getting through. Reality is dawning. The White Paper recognises the dangers without nuclear of security of supply risks and not meeting carbon reduction targets. It also acknowledges that without nuclear carbon reduction would be more expensive and the cost to the economy higher.
As Tony Blair takes his final curtain – or curtains - across the world, let us acknowledge that he has at least given nuclear and therefore 21stC Britain a chance. It is now up to Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister in waiting, to confirm the Government’s “preliminary view” and get on with it.
It is still going to be a close run thing whether we shall avoid blackouts, even if the great clunking fist can hammer things through. Encouragingly, Alistair Darling, Industry Secretary, seemed to concede before publication of the White Paper that things had been left very late indeed.
CONSULTATION
The Government wants to decide on whether to open up the nuclear option by the end of the year.
Even if it is able to do so, we shall do well to have the first new nuclear power station feeding the grid by 2017. This is not because of the time it will take to build it – say, five years - but the time required to licence a reactor and get the regulatory infrastructure right, given we have been so lackadaisical about energy for a decade or more.
When your committee has had chance to digest the various consultative documents issued with the Energy White Paper, it will forward its comments to the Government. The two principal documents are on nuclear power and on the future planning regime.
It is very important to get the planning regime right, given the way in which the Greens have used the existing system to delay any development, let alone nuclear. We have consistently sought a system that allows proper local representation without the endless delays inherent in arguments about need, safety and economics.
The Government, it seems, will certify need. The Nuclear Installations Inspectorate will certify safety.
And, given that private enterprise is to build any nuclear power stations, the companies will have to take the risk. It remains to be seen how inquiries handle all this and how well the new unelected quango being set up to bestow final planning permission for major projects is received.
We may be a few High Court judgements away from clarity.
WHAT A MIXED RECEPTION!
Our summary of the overall view of the White Paper, is as follows: “Well, it has the makings of a strategy, but everything will depend on performance”. Given the gap between political rhetoric and action these days, this is understandable.
Hence perhaps the exasperated reaction of much of the national press. We summarise it below: Telegraph: The challenge that will face Prime Minister Brown will be to drive through a nuclear expansion in the teeth of opposition from the green lobby. He cannot afford to fail. The danger that the lights could go out in the decades ahead is all too real”.
Times: The Government must stop sending ambiguous signals and make absolutely clear as soon as possible that nuclear energy will have a large and growing role in the provision of power for the people Mail: A preliminary view (about allowing investment in nuclear)? After 10 years? For sheer neglect of public duty Mr Blair’s abject failure to secure our energy supplies leaves one gasping.
Express: Frederick Forsyth, columnist: Nuclear power is the only way to guard our future.
Sun: Either we launch a long overdue programme of nuclear stations or risk shivering round our hearth while burning the furniture to warm a kettle.
This was countered by: Guardian: (under heading “All clear for nuclear”) – Recent years have seen many new ideas for greener energy yet, for all yesterday’s grand talk of big challenges and pressing deadlines, few of them found a home in the white paper. So much heat, so little light”.
Independent: There is still time to avoid this nuclear folly.
Mirror: (under heading “Nuclear cautiously”) – Darling may have changed his mind but he has his work cut out if he is to change the minds of the public”.
Well, not if this snapshot of editorial opinion reflects public opinion. The Guardian’s ICM poll, however, showed 49 per cent against nuclear compared with 44 per cent for – a rise, it claimed, in antipathy on 2005. Does all this add up?
INDUSTRY MORE POSITIVE
British newspapers find panning the Government makes commercial sense. They think it helps to sell their product, even if they broadly support the Government. They leave wider industry to take care of their energy needs.
Their energy interest was in safe hands on May 23. Richard Lambert, director general of the CBI, thought a combination of nuclear and renewable sources alongside more efficient gas, coal and oil generation could deliver a reliable energy supply while tackling carbon emissions.
The nuclear industry was also optimistic. Keith Parker, director of the Nuclear Industry Association, said the White Paper clearly recognised the strategic importance of nuclear and the need for clear policy decisions to make nuclear part of the energy supply mix.
Proof of sustained global revival
Santiago San Antonio, director general of Foratom, which represents the European nuclear industry, found in the White Paper “a positive signal for potential investors that now is the time to go nuclear again”. He even said it “proves that the global revival of nuclear power will be sustained in the long term”.
Let’s hope so, but it has taken 10 years to get this far in Britain – and so far there is not a single licensed reactor, let alone a nuclear power station on order. Westinghouse, GE and Areva seem to be in the NII’s licensing queue so far and wooing British Energy for power station sites.
In a letter in The Times on May 25, Robert Freer, an engineer and member of SONE’s committee, gave vent to widespread frustration as follows: “If Mr Blair thought that ten years ago energy policy was a ‘quiet backwater’, he clearly wasn’t listening to the experts. All serious energy engineers and analysts have told him for the past ten years that we needed to build new nuclear power stations; if we had a Minister for Energy with a seat in the Cabinet perhaps that message would have got through”.
ARE THEY SERIOUS?
Apart from the usual stuck-record scaremongering about terrorism, proliferation and nuclear waste, the Greens seem to be bereft of a decent argument against nuclear. The best they can do is to argue that investment in nuclear will deprive renewables and micro-generation of capital.
They seem to overlook the point that it would be a very good thing if it did since renewables – i.e.
wind for the foreseeable future – and microgeneration are no solution to the energy supply or carbon problems and, in the case of microgeneration, likely to be positively damaging.
There is very little point in spending a projected £32m over 25 years on wind if it won’t render a single coal, oil, gas or nuclear power station redundant.
The plain fact is that the Greens are stranded on a tide of dawning national interest and can now do nothing more than make a nuisance of themselves, at which they are immensely practised. Expect a few years of intensified guerrilla warfare against nuclear, fought with religious fanaticism.
The people’s power
This is where the public comes in, as Terry Wynn, a SONE member and former Labour MEP, has pointed out to us. Nuclear power is in fact the people’s power because it is a proven, safe source of electricity that is the cheapest clean generating option.
Why should ordinary folk be forced by green fanatics to pay uselessly through the nose for unreliable electricity when nuclear is available? It is a highly pertinent question when every day brings news of some new rubbish or road tax dreamt up by those dancing to green tunes.
Meanwhile, we have to ask whether the greens are serious about combating global warming when they reject out of hand the one form of power that does the job rather effectively.
DELIBERATELY OBTUSE
Rehearsing options is a well-known hazard of the Minister’s (and press officer’s) trade. What usually happens is that the most exciting or ludicrous but least likely option commands the headlines, especially if it also has a scare factor.
Thus we became preoccupied for a time with the notion of shooting nuclear waste into the sun.
And so it came to pass that The Guardian led its Energy White Paper story with the Government “considering building nuclear power stations on the sites of old coal and gas-fired stations in Oxfordshire and the South East”. The source of this wonderful attempt to stir up the South where Labour is losing votes was a report from energy analyst, Jackson Consulting, for the DTI on possible sites for nuclear power stations.
Ease of connection to the National Grid is, according to the Jackson report, the main factor in determining a site’s suitability. This apparently makes Harwell the best available location.
Unfortunately, Harwell is in mid-Oxfordshire and not on the coast where nuclear power stations have traditionally been built.
Other newspapers put the four most likely sites as Hinkley Point, Sizewell, Bradwell and Dungeness where there would no doubt be a local welcome on the mat. They are also British Energy sites and BE has the distinct advantage of being a British nuclear generator, especially as most of our electricity supply is in foreign hands.
We wonder how long it will be before the Nuclear Decommissioning Agency wakes up to the fact that it has a commercial product in nuclear sites it has hitherto been bent of returning to greenfield status. Money talks.
SUPERB SYMOBOLISM
It was with wonderful timing that they chose to blow up before our very eyes the cooling towers at the former Chapelcross Magnox nuclear power station in the Scottish Borders. At that very moment the chances of Scotland providing the site for a new nuclear power station were being written off for political reasons.
Scotland may get a third of its electricity from nuclear power, but politically it is anti-nuke. The New Scottish Nationalist First Minister, Alex Salmond, won’t touch nuclear power with a bargepole and the Liberal Democrats even harbour the naïve ambition of powering Scotland 100 per cent with renewables.
This is causing some furious thinking North of the Border. Suppose they wake up in Edinburgh in 2020 to discover that renewables and carbon capture and storage have not delivered? Do they import English electricity? That would be logical, but embarrassing and expensive. And if Scotland were by then independent it would become dependent at least for its electricity. That would make it look silly. Or would it rely on Mr Putin and kiss good-bye to being carbon neutral? These questions have been commendably asked in The Herald. It is interesting that they assume the English will face the challenge and embrace nuclear.
PROCRASTINATION’S PRICE
“It was a delay too far”, BP said in pulling the plug on its hydrogen/carbon capture and storage (CCS) scheme in Scotland immediately after the publication of the Energy White Paper. It had planned to spend £500m converting natural gas into hydrogen to run a power plant at Peterhead and store the CO2 in a used oilfield.
Then it discovered that a competition for funds for CCS had been put back to November after a number of earlier delays. It is now expected to concentrate on similar schemes in the USA and Australia.
This is a familiar British story. Just look how we have frittered away our world nuclear leadership through political palsy, even to the point of flogging the Westinghouse reactor system we owned to the Japanese just as nuclear is to take off globally. Even worse, with the ink scarcely try on the Westinghouse sale documents, Toshiba snapped up $4bn worth of contracts in China.
This is why we have learned never to count our chickens – the theme of this Newsletter.
RANK HYPOCRISY
Just as we were going to press came news from the US Energy Information Administration that last year carbon emissions in America declined by 1.3 per cent while the economy grew at 3.3 per cent. This represents a cut of 78m tonnes in carbon emissions.
Last month the European Commission attacked the USA (and Australia) for their inaction on carbon emissions, even though EU emissions were up by 1-1.5 per cent last year. Moreover, its Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) was so illfounded that European industry emitted 30m tonnes of carbon less than permitted. And only two of the member-states seem likely to meet their Kyoto commitments. The kettle calling the pot black.
SONE’S VOICE HEARD
Your Secretary was amazed to discover when on May 2 he went to speak for SONE at NEMEX, the three-day energy management conference and exhibition at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, that he was being credited with starting the event. He certainly had a substantial role in the Department of Energy launching the energy managers’ movement in the 1970s, with their own national conference. That, it seems, has grown over the years into NEMEX.
For some unknown reason the Greens failed to turn up for a panel discussion of “A low carbon future – renewables or nuclear?”. The result was a substantially pro-nuclear panel, apart from the Lib Dem MP for Cambridge, David Howarth who shuddered at the very thought of uranium.
Your Secretary also gave the annual lecture to the Worshipful Company of Fuellers on May 9. A text has been sent to members whose e-mail addresses we have and it is also on the SONE website.
OBITUARY
It is with regret that we record the deaths of two members – Professor Robert Cahn FRS, of Cambridge, a leader in the field of materials science, and Dr G R Plumb, of Congleton, whose widow has taken over his membership.
CULHAM VISIT
Some 21 members have indicated their intention to visit Culham on June 19 for a briefing on progress with the fusion project and a tour of the site, including the Torus hall. Professor Sir Christopher Llewellyn Smith, director, will give a talk at noon followed by a tour, with buffet lunch at 2pm.
Culham can be reached from the A34 Marcham Interchange via the A415 through Abingdon and is on the left of the A415 about three miles from the A34. Members should bring ID – e.g their driving licence – and report to E3 entrance. The contact is Susan Hayward. The briefing will be in the Compass Room.
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