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Written by SONE
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Saturday, 01 September 2007 |
TWO SYMBOLS OF COLLECTIVE POLITICAL NEGLECT
What have Northern Rock and nuclear power in common? The answer is:
symbolism – the symbolism of neglect and dereliction of duty.
The run on Northern Rock has had serious consequences, according to
Richard Lambert, director general of the CBI. It has, he says, made us
look like a banana republic and shown that the banking regulatory
system has failed its first major test. For once, a public figure was
not speaking with the benefit of hindsight. Over the years there have
been many warnings about the risks of living heavily on tick, both
publicly and privately. Now the reckoning has come. It is not
calculated to ease the financing of nuclear power.
We have yet to encounter retribution on the energy front. But anyone who reads this Newsletter – and many other publications – knows that over the years we (and others) have been warning about the potential consequences of a failure to embrace nuclear power. At worst, it will be power cuts.
At best – if you are not a passionate about combating global warming – it will be a continuation of the rise in CO2 emissions.
Since the outset of this century we have been scraping around for enough generating capacity to meet peak load in winter. Occasionally it has been touch and go. We have been fortunate in having relatively mild winters. But it has been all too close for comfort and theoretically it could get worse, given that we are scheduled to lose a third of our existing generating capacity within 20 years.
In practice what will happen – indeed what is beginning to happen already - is that there will be a new dash for gas, placing us ever more at the price and supply mercy of Russia and Islamic producers. That is tacit recognition that renewables – effectively wind – is good for little else than massive profits (from subsidies) for operators.
Of course, every effort will be made to extend the lives of existing nuclear power stations. And in extremis – which is likely – the Government of the day will invoke the national interest to keep old coal-fired power stations – the greatest carbon emitters, apart from those using peat – on line.
We may as a result muddle through. With a bit of luck, the lights will stay on. But just as Northern Rock has made us look like a banana republic so our spiralling carbon emissions will expose the Government’s pretence of claiming to lead the battle against climate change as brazen hypocrisy.
All this, like an economy floating on a sea of dodgy debt, represents a national political failure in which leaders of all parties have allowed themselves to be led by the nose by fanatical, prejudiced and utterly impractical so-called Greens. If you want a lower carbon society, why reject the one fuel – uranium – that can reliably deliver it?
GREEN’S GUERRILLA WAR
During the Labour Party conference, Gordon Brown called for Britain to lead on energy and the environment “from nuclear to renewables”.
This was felt to be a gift to the Greens who are clutching at every straw to delay the development of nuclear power. They will use it as evidence that the latest round of consultation on the future of nuclear power, as ordered by the courts, has been a sham. The Prime Minister, they will say, confirmed that the Government had already made up its mind.
Those of us who believe that the Greens will go on seeking injunctions against new nuclear build until the country is reduced to stygian gloom and is smoking carbon like a chimney firmly believe they have taken down the Prime Minister’s words and intend to use them in evidence against him – and nuclear.
But the truth is that they would have been using lawyers as their shock troops in the battle to kill nuclear power – as distinct from save the planet – even if Mr Brown had said not a word on the subject. This was on the cards long before they threw their rattle out of the pram, as the Sun put it, and quit the Government’s consultations on whether we should build more nuclear power stations.
In withdrawing, a coalition of the usual suspects – notably Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, WWF and the Green Alliance – complained that the Government had failed fairly to reflect the arguments and was distorting the evidence to get the desired result.
In fact, the Greens long since lost the argument and are now reduced to crying “Foul” and carping in the courts about the process by which the nation secures its electricity supplies. If we had politicians worth their salt, they would have told them long ago that the tail is not going to be allowed to wag the dog and so impose insecurity and crippling energy costs on the nation.
The Greens are entitled to protest until they are blue in the face. But they are not entitled to dictate to a democratically elected Government how to look after the national interest.
BEWARE WASTE
The Government’s consultation on the future of nuclear power ends on October 10 and, superficially, has brought encouraging results. Its mass consultation this month with 1,000 citizens in eight major cities across Britain showed on average 46 per cent in favour of building more nuclear power stations and only 25 per cent against. A week earlier The Times’ Populus poll found that two thirds believed nuclear would form part of the future energy mix and only 20 per cent opposed to nuclear “under any circumstance”.
Leave aside some evidence of an erosion of support during the Government’s series of consultations that the Greens claimed distorted the evidence, what should worry us are the concerns about safety and the 92 per cent dubious about the increase in nuclear waste.
We need to recognise that, if the public are concerned about how little governments have done to deal with longer term nuclear wastes, they have some justice on their side. But they are wrong if they regard nuclear waste as an unsolved “problem” and that waste from new and much more efficient power stations would intensify it.
The nuclear industry has been managing its wastes pretty successfully for 50 years, but it would handle them better if the Government would designate a site for the storage of the more radioactive longer-term detritus. This is another aspect of the political failure discussed above.
You can be sure that the Greens will go to town on waste as part of their strategy of delay and argue that there must be no new power stations until the waste “problem” has been solved.
Unfortunately for them, Lord Flowers, that great nuclear controversialist, told the House of Lords in 2005 (Hansard, Cols 331-332) that “a method to ensure safe disposal for the indefinite future – namely, underground storage – has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt in other countries”. The “remaining issues of nuclear waste disposal”, he added, “must no longer be presented…..as a ‘prerequisite for deciding in principle the future of nuclear power in this country”.
We shall see who will prevail – an elected government backed up by expert opinion or an unelected pressure group seeking to impose its will on the nation, thereby imperilling security and competitiveness.
THE POSTURING SEASON
This is the season of pledges and mellow nuttiness. We refer to the party conference season. Apart from Gordon Brown’s brave or illjudged (take your pick) mention of nuclear at Labour’s conference, nuclear power was no subject for a gathering being wound up for a snap election or an anti-climax (again take your pick).
Will he go to the country and thereby delay securing Britain’s energy future still further or won’t he? As we write, David Cameron is spectacularly throwing overboard eccentric proposals for green taxes, notably on transport, brought forward by John Gummer and Zac Goldsmith in their 547-page tome reviewing the quality of life in this country. He remains at best agnostic on nuclear power.
It was therefore left to the Liberal Democrats to be visionary. They aim to make Britain carbon and nuclear free by 2050 and, so we are told, end the use of diesel/petrol by 2030. How they will do it remains a bit of a mystery, not least to Chris Huhne, their environment spokesman, who apparently sees himself as a leadership contender.
In answer to a question as to how he will eliminate diesel/petrol by 2030, he is reported to have said: “By using hydrogen fuel cells, better batteries and technology which does not yet exist”.
Do you feel safe in their hands? We also ask because Alex Salmond, Scotland’s First Minister, claimed this month that Scotland could now produce more power from renewables than nuclear which, he said, it did not therefore need.
The Scottish Executive – his very own government – was promptly forced to deny him.
It had to point out that Scotland’s two nuclear power stations – Hunterston and Torness – produce twice as much power as renewables, even when you include hydro.
God save us.
THE MORAL CASE
After all this, it was refreshing to pick up the September 15 issue of The Tablet. In an article on “The nuclear option”, a SONE member, Dr Peter Hodgson, a nuclear physicist and emeritus fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, found it sad that many environmental groups are bitterly opposed to nuclear power, even though it is the energy source that poses the least threat to the environment.
“Such groups”, he wrote, “justify their opposition by repeating arguments that have been refuted many times: that it is costly (if so, why are so many countries using nuclear power and building new reactors?); produces radioactive waste (yes, but it can be safely stored underground); causes leukaemia (refuted by detailed medical statistics); is prone to accidents such as those at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl (which were due to faulty design and flagrant disregard for the operating instructions – there have been no other serious accidents during a total of around 10,000 reactor years); and it relies on dwindling reserves of uranium (yes, but there is still plenty around and if it ever becomes uneconomic to mine uranium ‘fast reactors’ using the uranium-238 isotope (99.3 per cent of natural uranium) can take over from the present thermal reactors which can only use the uranium-235 isotope (just 0.7 per cent of natural uranium).
“Some environmental groups are using every possible legal stratagem to delay the new reactors, and are thus responsible for increasing the chance of devastating climate change, reducing food production and denying poorer people of the energy they need to improve their life expectancy and standard of living. This is surely not their intention.
“Choice of the best energy sources is an urgent moral problem, particularly as it affects the poorest people. Here the Church can make a vital contribution towards reducing the unreasonable opposition to nuclear power. People no longer trust politicians or spokesmen for industry, but they might well take notice of the Church”.
BIOFUELS BATTERED
If there is one thing that has marked September 2007, apart from the great election tease, it is the hammering inflicted on biofuels. Scientists in Britain, the USA and Germany, in an article in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, reported that emissions from biofuels derived from maize produce more greenhouse gas than they save – 70 per cent and 50 per cent respectively more than fossil fuels. Professor Keith Smith (Edinburgh) said: “The supposed benefits of biofuels are even more disputable than had been thought hitherto”.
His colleague, Dr Dave Reay, calculated that, if the US Senate succeeded in increasing maize ethanol production sevenfold by 2022, greenhouse gas emissions would rise by six per cent.
The OECD, representing the industrial nations, then argued that subsidies for biofuels could lead to food price rises and damage to forests and natural habitats, with only limited impact on climate change. It said the current push to expand biofuels is creating unsustainable tensions that will disrupt markets without generating significant environmental benefits.
Already the price of grain is soaring, Mexicans are furious about the rising cost of tortillas and Italians have downed spoons in protest about the rising price of pasta.
NO WAY TO CUT CO2
The September assault on biofuels was closely followed by persistent attacks on UK and EU methods of reducing carbon output. First, Ofgem, the UK gas and electricity regulator, called on the Government to rely on a single carbon price – such as in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) – to reduce CO2 emissions instead of on the Renewables Obligation Scheme (ROS). In response to a Government consultation on ROS, it said this scheme is the most costly and inefficient form of reducing CO2 emissions. Consumers are paying six times more to abate a tonne of CO2 than through the ETS.
Currently ROS is costing consumers nearly £1bn a year and is expected to total £32bn by 2020.
In another response to the consultation, the Renewable Energy Foundation wants the system replaced by one less complicated, providing better value for the consumer, no hyper-profits for developers and cost-effective emissions reductions. One interim measure would be to cut support for onshore wind.
The only trouble with all this that the ETS doesn’t seem much to write home about either.
Reuters reported at the end of August that EU power companies are making billions of euros in excess profits out of permits given to them to emit CO2, currently worth 20 euros a tonne, by charging consumers as if they had been made to pay for them.
Michael Grubb, chief economist at the Carbon Trust, commented: “It is free money. It’s how you’d expect companies to behave, but politically and morally it is going to be hard to justify making so much money out of a scheme designed to reduce emissions – with consumers footing the bill”.
No wonder the Wall Street Journal spoke of “Europe’s carbon con job”.
As if all this was not enough, one commentator described carbon offsetting by the eco-guilty of the West as the eco-enslavement of the world’s poor by forcing them on to, for example, backbreaking treadmills, substituting human energy for fossil fuels. And UHY accountants claimed that the UK Government coins 50 times more in green taxes (£29.3bn) more than it hands back in tax breaks for environmental initiatives (£549m).
Who said nuclear power was uneconomic? It’s cheap at this price.
PATRONS’ LUNCH
Damon de Laszlo entertained nine fellow SONE patrons to a very successful lunch at his offices in the Albany, London, on September 10. The discussion was led by Nigel Hawkins, an investment analyst, who is examining nuclear’s competitiveness on behalf of the Economic Research Council.
He said that his modelling had found nuclear power coming out at 2.75-3.25pkWh on the assumption of a 7.5 per cent discount rate, a 70/ 30 debt/equity split, a 40-year life and an overnight capital cost of £1.35bn. Financing depended on assumptions but he thought a guarantee of longer term contracts was crucial.
Patrons expressed concerns about the risks to electricity supply and of Britain being left behind technologically without a new nuclear building programme, and about a lack of political consensus on the need for nuclear power.
WEBSITE
A new facility has been introduced to the SONE website enabling visitors to register for a quarterly bulletin to be sent to them by e-mail.
From this month the bulletin will appear fresh each quarter, incorporating news and developments as they occur.
OBITUARY
We regret to record the sudden death of a member, J M Hayles CBE, of Hawarden, Flintshire, and extend our condolences to his widow and family.
AGM The October Newsletter will contain a full report of the annual general meeting to be held at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers on Tuesday, October 23 (12noon-3pm). It will take the usual form of the minutes of the meeting.
The principal speaker will be Bill Coley, chief executive of British Energy (2pm). Formal notice of the meeting together with the annual report and accounts will reach members shortly. We hope you will be able to attend.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 26 October 2007 )
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