THE STORY OF THE RATIONAL DOG AND ITS MAD GREEN TAIL
It is perhaps as well that Parliament is in recess and that, as we
write, the weather remains dull, damp and depressing instead of
reinforcing the global warmers in their convictions. Otherwise,
Ministers would have their waffle ability severely tested. Until
October 10, when the formal consultation on the future of nuclear power
ends, they are in purdah.
While they can – and do – call for more and more useless wind power, they are prevented by a court order to consult properly from saying an encouraging word about nuclear power. Why, in an interview with the Financial Times, Malcolm Wicks, the recycled Energy Minister, even said contingency work was under way against the possibility that the Government came out against giving nuclear power its head.
This serves only to show how we as a people have allowed the anti-nuke fanatics to control the debate and even ludicrously to pretend that they have never been consulted on the nuclear power option. It represents the hi-jacking of a mature democracy by a tiny minority of the unwashed (to judge from TV pictures of the Heathrow climate change demo) and is a damaging blot on our body politic. Tails have their uses but should never be allowed to wag the dog.
All over the world – but especially in the West – the green tail of society is seeking to dictate how we shall – and shall not - supply our people with electricity. If they get their way, we can be pretty certain that society will be brought close to breakdown, if not actually broken.
They will not, of course, be blamed if the lights go out because they are, in every sense of the word, irresponsible. But politicians will be held culpable and they will have no excuse – other than their weakness – because every month that goes by demonstrates the inadequacy of a nonnuclear future, as we show below.
Put simply, in the medium term you cannot power Britain adequately, reliably, competitively and with a diminishing “carbon footprint” without nuclear power. That is blindingly obvious except to the Mad Green Mullahs and their tribe. But such is their malign influence that every single political party seeking office in Britain desperately hopes that some new source of electricity will come riding over the horizon like the Fifth Cavalry enabling them to avoid going nuclear.
The significance of 2007 is that time is running out. If rationality prevails, by the end of the year the Greens will go the way of Col. Custer, though we must not make the mistake of believing that this time the “dead” will lie down.
EXPECTATIONS HIGH
Those of us who have had the privilege of being exposed to the thoughts of the nuclear industry, the reactor companies and power station builders know they are raring to go. Some of them see a UK – or more likely England, given the attitudes of the Nationalists – embracing nuclear power as a powerful influence over Western Europe, apart from the already enlightened France and Finland. We are seen as a commercial springboard.
While a world nuclear renaissance would put pressure on component suppliers – notably heavy forgings – they are optimistic that, given the chance, they could do the job, provided the politicians keep their noses out and there is no tinkering with licensed designs. The prospect of a respectable carbon price regime would help.
Taking account of licensing and public inquiry time, they do not see the London 2012 Olympics as a capacity constraint. In short, what they need is a firm, unequivocal decision this year and a Government determination to explain, promote and defend any new pro-nuclear policy.
BE central player
The four competing reactor companies have in British Energy the sites for new nuclear power stations and a labour force of 6,100 to run them.
BE says it is talking to more than 10 companies about potential partnerships, ranging from joint operating agreements to equity participation and long term supply contracts. Out of this dialogue it intends, with a fair wind from the Government, to come up with one or two projects next year.
That sounds realistic, given a recent straw poll taken at the Royal Academy of Engineering. In the view of the experts, Britain would be capable of building between six and ten new nuclear power stations over the next 20 years, providing, say, 7,500MW. This, however, would barely replace forecast nuclear closures.
The message is clear: we cannot afford any more political procrastination. With a third of our overall generating capacity likely to close within 20 years, we are already on a knife edge. No wonder the Government has given Severn Power the go ahead to build an 800MW gas-fired power station in Newport, Mon., contrary to its strategic need to reduce reliance on gas imports.
We would be more convinced the Government had the courage of its convictions if the Treasury had not now sat for a good 10 months on the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate’s bid for a few £millions to engage inspectors to licence future reactors for use in Britain.
HOW DAFT CAN YOU GET?
You would have thought environmentalists would have been protesting about the Government launching what could be a new dash for gas. All we have heard is a low disappointed moan from Friends of the Earth that the Newport power station does not include “more fuel-efficient technologies”, whatever that means. Are they serious about reducing CO2 emissions? We have often suspected that, for reasons best known to themselves, they are not seriously for anything; they are only seriously against nuclear power and the liberation of the populace by the internal combustion and jet engines. Indeed, we now know that they couldn’t care less about our economic well-being.
Stephen Hale, director of the Green Alliance, wrote in the Independent on August 20: “Climate security, not energy security, is the real strategic imperative”. Presumably, he means that there is no point in preserving our lifestyle if in the end the globe becomes insupportably hot. That is, of course, horribly defeatist and ignores technology.
Logic should surely require him to embrace the one technology - nuclear power – that can minimise greenhouse gas emissions. The annual report of British Energy notes that its eight nuclear power stations last year made the largest single British contribution towards meeting UK climate change targets by avoiding the emission of 33.7m tonnes of CO2 Instead, five green activists attached themselves to a concrete block at Sizewell on the last day of the Heathrow demo. How daft can you get?
SHOCK, HORROR
In the energy business, you find there is a lot of daftness about. On August 13 The Guardian made a tremendous fuss about officials “secretly briefing Ministers that Britain has no hope of getting remotely near the EU target” of securing 20 per cent of our energy (not just electricity) from renewables by 2020.
Tony Blair signed up to the target last Spring but the best officials now think Britain can achieve is nine per cent by 2020, or a mere five per cent without changes. They have therefore suggested that perhaps Ministers would like to lobby Brussels for a more flexible interpretation of the target by including, for example, nuclear power.
After all, Lord Sainsbury, former Science Minister, once described nuclear as renewable.
Predictably, this had environmentalists “shocked” and “betrayed” and accusing officials of “breathtaking cynicism”. The Tories were “staggered” and the Liberal Democrats called for “an end to fudging and start acting” – as if that would overcome the laws of physics.
The kindest thing that can be said for EU Ministers - and Tony Blair - is that they knew not what they did - or didn’t listen to their engineers.
Professor Michael Laughton, of London University, has said from the first that Britain could not meet the target.
Going bonkers
After 17 years’ development, wind power last year generated only one per cent of our electricity (see the official DUKES 2007). At best, renewables overall generate only 4.3% of our power. That includes everything – landfill gas, co-firing, waste combustion, biomass, sewage gas, other biofuels, hydro, wind and solar – and represents about 2 per cent of total energy consumed.
Arguably, wind offers the greatest potential for development. But what use is it when grid engineers know that, however much intermittent wind power you have, it has to be matched by reliable, continuous conventional capacity? Otherwise, what would have happened on December 18 last year when an anti-cyclone brought short periods when the wind industry was contributing nothing to the grid and even taking power off it? You will reasonably conclude that energy policy has gone bonkers when we tell you that on July 26 Ofgem, the gas and electricity generator, announced that it has approved £5bn investment in Britain’s power transmission networks over the next five years to help link more renewables – in practice wind - to the grid. For that money we could have a couple of nuclear power stations delivering reliable, clean, competitive and unsubsidised electricity. Do you feel your electricity is in safe hands?
NUCLEAR IS GREENEST
Lest any casual reader thinks we are against renewables, let us make it clear SONE is all in favour of them, provided they meet the tests required of nuclear power – safe, reliable, competitive and minimise CO2 emissions. All too often these tests are ignored – and not least their economics.
Another aspect is land use that SONE has raised as an issue. Now an American academic, Jesse Ausubel, Professor of Environmental Science at Rockefeller University, New York, has analysed the amount of energy that various renewables can produce per square metre of land.
He concludes: “Nuclear energy is green. Considered in Watts per square metre, nuclear has astronomical advantages over its competitors….The dense heart of the atom offers by far the smallest footprint in nature of any energy source. Benefiting from economies of scale, nuclear energy could multiply its power output and even shrink the energy system in the same way that computers have become more powerful and smaller…More renewables require more land”.
Prof. Ausubel finds hydro-electricity the least efficient way of using land to produce power and says that “increased use of biomass fuel in any form is criminal” because of the land it takes from nature. Biomass requires three to ten times more land than wind but New York City would require a wind farm the size of Connecticut just to power its electrical equipment and gadgets.
MORALITY OF CONSERVATION
SONE is also all in favour of energy economy and efficiency – it does not make sense to waste anything – but we are not starry-eyed about its product. Now its morality has been questioned, surprisingly in last month’s New Statesman energy supplement, by Dr Brian Cox member of the High Energy Physics Group at the University of Manchester.
He wrote: “Energy conservation sounds morally right. But it is in fact only necessary if we generate energy in an environmentally destructive way by burning fossil fuels. It is equally problematic in the long term to demand that global energy consumption remains constant, or even falls, by restricting generation to renewable sources and ruling out nuclear power of all kinds, as many environmental organisations suggest.
“This is immoral because it surely condemns vast numbers of the world’s citizens to a harder life than my own today, and dangerous because it will prevent us from expanding intellectually, technologically and physically, as we must if we are to survive in the violent universe that exists just a few hundred miles above our heads.
“What is required is a significant increase in research spending worldwide, with the aim of increasing the number of young people moving into science and learning how to release the vast potential of fusion power.
“The goal of energy policy today should be to bridge the gap until this happens, without irreparably damaging the environment. But we must ensure that the bridging strategy lasts for as short a period as possible, for it is only through an expansion of energy use that we will give that most precious piece of nature – ourselves – the best chance of survival”.
THE COST OF COOLING
An academic at Yale University, William Nordhaus, described as the world’s leading expert on the economics of climate change, has come up with some inconvenient value-formoney figures about recent climate change studies. He has published them as The Challenge of Global Warming: Economic Models and Environmental Policy.
Essentially, he is looking for the optimal climate change policy that maximises reductions in greenhouse gas emissions (and containment of global temperature) and the population’s economic benefit. He puts the Sir Nicholas Stern and Al Gore proposals through the wringer of his own model and finds both a bad deal.
Stern would reduce future damage from global warming by $13 trillion but at a cost of $27 trillion. The Gore plan would reduce damage by $12 trillion but cost nearly $34 trillion. Instead Mr Nordhaus proposes an escalating global carbon tax over the 21stC with a net benefit of $3 trillion – and concentrating research on finding new low carbon technologies. Like nuclear power?
PORRITT: LATEST NEWS
You will recall that we recently wrote to Sir Jonathon Porritt, chairman of the Sustainable Development Commission, suggesting the Commission should consider its position as a Government advisor since its advice had twice been ignored on nuclear power. He took this badly. In “duly disregarding” our letter, he told your Secretary: “One always hopes that people of your standing in society have rather better things to do than to write such utterly pathetic letters”.
Your Secretary duly responded “We note you propose to disregard our original letter. This does not surprise us, but it does not change our contention that the SDC is unsustainable on the basis of its present approach to serious issues. We would advise you to treat SONE more seriously and less petulantly.” There is now some evidence that, even if he places undue reliance on securing an 80% cut in CO2 emissions by 2050, Sir Jonathon is coming to terms with the prospect of more nuclear power, even if he thinks it won’t do much for CO2 reduction. On July 18 he wrote in the FT : “We can even build a new generation of nuclear reactors – and many think we will”.
SONE’S WRITES TO BERR
SONE has submitted its response to the Government’s questionnaire on its consultative document on The Future of Nuclear Power and it is posted in full and can be downloaded from the SONE website (www.sone.org.uk). We hope that more members, taking their cue from the document, will submit their own observations covering the whole or part of the questionnaire.
BERR incidentally is the new shorthand for what used to be the DTI – now the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform.
CONSULTATION
By all accounts the series of regional consultations being held by the Government on the future of nuclear power is going reasonably well for nuclear power. There is to be a mass consultation of more than 1,000 citizens, randomly chosen we are assured, on September 8. It is not, the Government emphasises, a referendum. Nor should it be since energy supply is not a constitutional issue. But a failure of electricity supply can be a matter of life and death and we are confident that, if the issues are fully examined, there can be only one outcome.
AGM
This is a reminder that SONE’s annual general meeting will be held on Tuesday, October 23 (12noon to 3pm) at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers at 1 Birdcage Walk, just off Parliament Square, by courtesy of British Energy. Coffee will be available from 11.30am and there will be a buffet lunch. The annual report and accounts will be circulated to members early in October.
The first half of the meeting will be devoted to SONE affairs and in the afternoon (from 2pm) we shall be addressed by Bill Coley, chief executive of British Energy.
Those intending to be present should inform the Secretary on 020-8660-8970 or by e-mail:
