|
Written by SONE
|
|
Friday, 01 June 2007 |
WE ARE NOT THE ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE – LOOK ELSEWHERE
Why is Western Europe, with the exception of those special cases,
France and Finland, floundering in the global gearing up for a new
nuclear age? The world had plans, at the last count, to raise the
number of power stations by 60% from 435.
The answer is simple: Western democracy has gone wrong. It has been hijacked by a militant minority with a mixture of motives, from touchy-feely sentimentality to anti-capitalism, to impose their will upon an impressionable populace. They present themselves as environmental campaigners determined to save Earth. Their terms exclude nuclear.
Three Mile Island (which hurt nobody) and Chernobyl (after 21 years, officially only 56 deaths so far from radiation) came like manna from above. They used them ruthlessly to frighten the people against nuclear. You would never believe that Chernobyl’s official death toll is little more than the annual loss of life in UK coal-mining at its safest. Still less would you imagine that the safety system at Three Mile Island worked.
Nonetheless, the two provided the scaremongering base to their campaign against nuclear. It preceded their almost Damascene conversion from global cooling to global warming. The two were then brought together in a campaign to preserve the planet in which we are made to feel guilty and the need to scourge ourselves with self-denying ordinances made necessary without nuclear power.
Politicians proved astonishingly compliant, largely because fossil fuels existed in abundance and global warming was something to be uncritically supported, if not seriously addressed. The result is that all over Europe energy policy has been made not on engineering advice but deliberately without it – or certainly any that showed any spark of independence.
We are now locked into any and every bright idea, regardless of feasibility, capacity, observed results or cost. We are paying through the nose for supposed solutions that are driving us ever closer to energy shortage and electrical breakdown. The answer to all our prayers and needs, we are told, without any respectable engineering input, are renewables and energy conservation.
This autumn’s issue before Europe – and more especially the UK as the Government consults on the nuclear option – is whether we can belatedly come to our senses, clearly identify our real interests, take serious expert advice and actually go nuclear. The fact that we may be too late to avoid disruption of national life is no reason why we should not set out to make our energy and electricity supplies more secure. Let us be clear, it is not members of SONE who are enemies of the people.
HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL
Our optimism that the Government may eventually come in the autumn broadly to our way of thinking on energy policy owes nothing to any knowledge of Gordon Brown’s thought processes. We assume a White Paper arguing the case for nuclear and consulting on its deployment would never have seen the light of day without his agreement.
But that still leaves something of a hole in the bucket. The White Paper fails to clarify the Government’s approach to the market. It proposes ever more profligate intervention in the market for renewable sources of energy (even though they are mostly likely to be marginal) while insisting that, however much we need nuclear, it will only go ahead if the market so decides.
This is no way to draw the boundary between state and market. It suggests that the Government is perfectly prepared to pick winners, however flawed, and to write off other projects, however valuable they are considered. It provides no basis for commercial confidence in the energy regime.
Real position?
In fact, nobody believes that that is the Government’s real position, whatever it looks like. Nothing would surprise us about its profligacy over renewables and its misplaced faith in energy conservation. But what would shock us would be its meek acceptance of the loss of the nuclear option if the “nuclear industry” sat on its hands.
If the Government felt able to tell the truth, it might go something like this: “Politically, we have to be seen to be going through these expensive motions with renewables and energy saving. We are also clear that nuclear does not need any subsidy. But we are prepared, as would be expected, to give nuclear all the help we can, short of financial inducement, to create the right framework for its development.” Why cannot it tell the truth? Because its activists have been greenwashed for years in gash ideas.
So, too, it seems, have Tory and Lib Dem leaders.
A COLD DOUCHE
It was while we were reflecting on these matters in a meeting reviewing the Energy White Paper that our optimism had cold water poured all over it. Nine months ago we learned that the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate had put in for £2m or £3m to recruit the staff necessary to licence reactors for future use in the UK.
The NII is now confronted with four competing reactors from Europe, GE, Westinghouse and Canada, perhaps more than was envisaged last autumn when the talk was of possibly three routes requiring investigation.
Over the months we have continued to inquire whether the Treasury has graciously consented to sanction this modest amount – considering how much, by common consent, is wasted elsewhere – in the interests of Britain’s energy security. And then we discovered in the tortuous language of the Civil Service that the Treasury were still pondering.
This does not suggest that the Government is yet seized of the urgency of the need for nuclear’s development. Indeed, we wonder what the hell they think they are playing at. Let us hope that with Gordon Brown out of the Treasury and into No 10 the Treasury log jam is soon released.
SHORT-SIGHTED
Your committee is finalising its response to the Government’s consultative document on nuclear power and will put it on the SONE website as soon as it has been submitted. Meanwhile, we are receiving individual submissions from members.
The first two from Dr P D Wilson, of Seascale, part-author and general editor of The Nuclear Fuel Cycle (OUP) and Ron Hargreaves (Egremont) home in on reprocessing. They take issue with the Government notion that a “once through” fuel cycle is adequate.
Dr Wilson thinks the Government is “excessively short-sighted, severely limiting the value of nuclear energy”. He says: “Since a single pass through a thermal reactor can realise only about one per cent of the energy potentially available from uranium as mined, the once-through operating system is extremely wasteful and, through the need for more mining, causes greater environmental damage than is currently necessary; only reprocessing can recover the unused material for cycling”.
Dr Wilson admits that in the short-term it is more expensive than discarding the spent fuel as waste, so a lack of commercial interest is understandable. He adds: “This is a major strategic issue, comparable with the drive for increasing renewable capacity, and the Government should be positively encouraging.
Fortunately, the delay before disposal allows for a possible change of policy for which provision should be made”.
Mr Hargreaves believes that “reprocessing irradiated nuclear fuel is a prime example of responsible recycling and should not be abandoned.” He says that a dramatic increase in the consumption of uranium can be foreseen as world population grows and, by maintaining a reprocessing capability together with a fast reactor policy, the UK could substantially insulate itself from the effects.
THE UNIVERSAL ANSWER
The bureaucrat’s answer to every problem is to set up a committee some of which, as Harold Wilson observed, take minutes and spend years.
Sometimes a proliferation of committees is necessary when there is no overarching strategy.
Everything is then dealt with ad hoc and the wreckage can be impressive.
The Energy White Paper reveals a magnificent crop of bodies and schemes all trying to get us to do what the Government perceives to be the right thing. The Financial Times has described the result as a Greenplan version of Gosplan.
This is what we mean: the EU ETS and the UK emissions trading scheme; the Carbon Reduction Commitment; the Energy Performance Certificate; the Renewables Obligation, now with bands; the Carbon Emissions Reduction Target; the Carbon Capture and Storage initiative; the Distributed Generation package; the Biomass Strategy; the Energy Efficiency Commitment; the Renewables Transport Fuel Obligation; the Low Carbon Transport Innovation Strategy; the Environmental Transformation Fund; the Energy Technologies Institute; the Climate Change Levy; Climate Change Agreements; the Coal Forum; National Policy Statements; Warm Front; UK Fuel Poverty Strategy; Sector Skills Council etc.
This is not exhaustive and cannot be with the Climate Change Bill and the Planning White Paper before us. It does, however, make a powerful point.
THE COST
One of the consequences of all this is to be found in consumers’ fuel bills. According to Alastair Buchan, chief executive of Ofgem, the energy regulator, green schemes now cost £15 of the average annual household fuel and light bill. This will not grow less. Indeed, Ofgem has already approved another £5.50 a year on our bills to fund £10bn of electricity network upgrading – including transporting wind power when the wind blows.
This makes a change from five years ago when Ofgem was assiduously driving electricity generators to the brink of bankruptcy by forcing wholesale prices down by 40 per cent.
After research, Ofgem claims that consumers are willing to pay more to tackle climate change. But it also admits that there is “a spread of opinion” on the threat of climate change and that consumers want to know what is behind any green premium. Ofgem has already told them what an expensive option wind power is. How long before consumers demand better options such as nuclear?
DAYLIGHT ROBBERY…
That is the heading on a report in the Australian Nuclear Federation’s e-mail news. It refers to solar power subsidies and quotes Bruno Comby, head of the French group, Environmentalists for Nuclear, as follows: “Nuclear electricity in France has a production cost between 3 and 4 Eurocents per kWh. This is significantly lower here in France than electricity produced from coal, gas (even without giving a cost to CO2 emissions) and all other production methods except hydraulic dams. The cost of electricity to the end consumer, mentioned, for example, in my electricity bill, is 7.78 Eurocents per kWh (March 2007) without taxes (add 19.6% for French VAT).
“Anybody who installs a few square metres of solar panels on his rooftop can sell the kWh produced to EdF which is obliged by law to buy it at the scandalously high cost of 55 Eurocents per kWh – more than 15 times the production cost of EdF’s nuclear electricity”.
Even in France, an energy exporter generating 80 per cent of its electricity by nuclear means and much of the rest with hydro, there is a green compulsion to produce uneconomic power. It just shows you how far the fervour has gone. In Germany, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the subsidy for solar power is a stratospheric Euros 1,000 per tonne of avoided carbon dioxide emissions – ten times more than the wind power subsidy, which many would say is excessive.
The Australian bulletin also reports the rise and fall of solar power. Average yearly data from an Olympic village there records that, from peak power at noon, it drops to 97.6% at 11am and 1pm; 88.5% at 10am and 2pm; 68.4% at 9am and 3pm; 39.6% at 8am and 4pm; 14.2% at 7am and 5pm; and 1.5% at 6am and 6pm.
DON’T BE DAFT…
That headline summarises, in effect, the message from the IEA to Germany over its nuclear phaseout policy. It will be bad for environmental protection, economic growth and energy security, so don’t do it. Actually, it has asked the Germans to “reconsider”.
It says that shutting down its 17 nuclear power stations, supplying 27 per cent of the country’s electricity, would have negative effects on the German economy; prevent it from achieving its CO2 reduction targets by forcing investment in lignite coal-fired plants; and increase dependence on Russian gas. The reduced security of supply would also spill over into other countries and would increase congestion on North/South transmission lines.
We go back to the beginning of this Newsletter – the remarkable propensity for making policy these days that doesn’t stand up.
FEEDBACK FROM REALITY
Professor Michael Laughton, Emeritus Professor of Electrical Engineering at London University, has just published a paper through the Centre for Policy Studies on the problem of policies based on dogma. He makes the point that dangers to society may be mortal without being immediate and one of them is the prevailing social vision and the dogmatism with which the ideas, assumptions and attitudes lying behind it are held.
He quotes Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy (1996), as saying that the great catastrophes of history have usually involved something more than especially evil or erroneous views – typically an additional and crucial ingredient by which feedback from reality has been prevented to avert following a dangerous course to a fatal conclusion.
He says the feedback from reality is that without reliable electricity supplies a modern society could not function. Yet in January the European Council agreed a legally binding target of 20 per cent of inland energy consumption from renewable sources by 2020 which, so far as the UK is concerned, is unachieveable.
“The danger”, Prof Laughton says, “is that such an unrealistic energy policy and the pursuit of unachieveable renewable energy targets could delay or even ‘shut out’ the viable longer term options of clean coal and nuclear build over the coming decade”.
Far from being the enemies of the people, SONE members are the feedback from reality. Is anybody with a sense of urgency listening?
VISIT TO CULHAM
Some 20 members of SONE had an extremely informative lecture and tour of the JET fusion project at Culham, Oxfordshire, on June 19.
Professor Sir Christopher Lewellyn Smith, the director, gave an encouraging account of the international work to bring fusion power to the grid and thereby provide a new and effectively unlimited supply of electricity.
His best projection for commercial production was 30 years hence, though it might be cut if it were put on a “war footing”. They knew it worked. They knew they could heat up and agitate the basic deuterium and tritium to 100mdegsC, contain the mass within a magnetic field and transmit the heat caused by neutrons hitting the containment to generate steam and power. Already 16MW had briefly been generated.
But three things were needed: more R&D on both the magnetic field and containment materials; the vast scaling up of existing experiments; and the proving of the system’s reliability and its economics. So far projections of its economics are not way out – indeed, fiercely competitive with what we are paying for renewables – falling from 9 to 5 Eurocents per kWh longer term.
Sir Christopher argued that the goal was eminently well worth pursuing in the light of the energy outlook and, since fusion’s fuel was effectively unlimited, the process was free of CO2 and air pollution and the operation was intrinsically safe, with no radioactive ash or long-lived wastes.
We are grateful to Sir Christopher and his staff for a day well spent.
HONOUR
We congratulate Robert Armour, General Counsel to British Energy and a member of SONE’s committee, on the award of the OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List.
OBITUARY
We are sorry to record the death of a member, Thomas A Smith, of Culcheth, Warrington.
AGM
Please note in your diaries: SONE’s AGM will be held, courtesy British Energy, at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, 1 Birdcage Walk, London SW1 at 12 noon-3pm on Tuesday, October 23.
The period before a buffet lunch at 1.15pm will be occupied by the AGM and a discussion of SONE’s future in the light of the Energy White Paper. In the afternoon Bill Coley, chief executive of British Energy, will be the speaker (2-3pm). |
|
|
|
