THE WEATHER MAY LOOK SET FAIR BUT DARK CLOUDS LURK
So far so good. John Hutton’s statement of our need for nuclear power
was more positive than we expected. The Conservatives formally came on
board at the last minute to give us a measure of political consensus.
The Green “alternative” of renewables, micro-generation, CHP and energy
efficiency is now regularly being rubbished. We have moved a long way
in a short time.
But let us also keep our feet on the ground. We don’t have an order for a nuclear power station, only endless publicity about energy company intentions that butter no parsnips. We don’t have a reactor licensed for construction in the UK and are not likely to have one for several years. We have yet to negotiate a new but not yet finalised planning system with the bugs still in it. This will be meat and drink to a Green movement that is plotting a guerrilla war of obstruction and delay in the courts. And we haven’t a clue whether, when we do eventually start pouring concrete, the components such as pressure vessels will be readily available in view of global demand.
This is where procrastination gets you. It is a politicians’ natural instinct never to take a decision until it is unavoidable and this leads to a readiness to listen, in the interim, to all kinds of snake oil salesmen touting alternative medicine. If we are not yet quite up the creek without a paddle, time carries us relentlessly towards a disastrous cataract in the form of a hole in our electricity supply because of the impending closure of a third of our ageing generating capacity (20,000MW or 20 large power stations) within 20 years.
Against this background – and the temptations of gas and the evidence (see below) of backsliding into Green mumbo-jumbo by the EU – the prime need now is for a convincing demonstration by both the Government and the nuclear industry of commitment to a nuclear future and a sense of urgency. Neither will necessarily perform or, on past evidence, vigorously champion nuclear.
That means that anyone in SONE who thinks the battle is over is sorely deluded. It has only just started. We now have to push and prod the politicians into implementing their stated nuclear intentions. In facing this task, we should recognise that Labour is not in the best condition to do anything it may conceive as “unpopular” and that the leadership of the alternative (Conservative) Government is, unlike its Parliamentary party, at best grudging in its support for nuclear.
As the FT put it on January 11: “Public support is vital, especially since…the construction of plants will span several parliaments. Nuclear’s backers need to display stronger conviction”.
For SONE it means yet more slog. But at least we seem to be winning – slowly.
THE REACTION
Slow though progress may be, the reaction to the Government’s clearing the way for nuclear was remarkable for two reasons – the muted response from opponents (the result, it is said, of endless “spinning” of the Government’s intentions) and the rush of blood among hitherto unnoticed supporters of nuclear power.
Only the Independent was critical. It said: “The case does not stack up”. For the rest the common theme was a welcome for the end to a decade of prevarication. That was the line taken by the Telegraph, Mail and Times and even the Guardian grudgingly conceded that, however “unappealing” nuclear was, renewables were “impractical”.
But how’s this for an eclectic bunch lining up behind nuclear: Nick Cohen (Observer: “Blame the greens when the lights go off”); Camilla Cavendish (Times: “The Government has today taken a step in the right direction by standing up for nuclear”); Julia Hartley-Brewer (Sunday Express: “The sad truth is that the environmental lobby won’t be happy until we’re all sitting in mud huts rubbing sticks together to heat the water for a cup of tea”); John Gray, political philosopher (Guardian: “Any feasible remedy for the environmental crisis involves high-tech solutions…If we reject the nuclear option, we will inevitably end up going back to coal”); and Jeremy Clarkson, motoring iconoclast (Sunday Times: “The fact of the matter is this.
The decision to go nuclear has exposed the whole environmental cause for what it is: not a wellintentioned drive for clean power but a spiteful, mean-spirited drive for less power”.
LAPSES GALORE
As ever in this energy game, you take two steps forward and one back. Or to put it another way, the price of Governments doing the right thing is partly to offset it by their doing the wrong thing.
No doubt they justify themselves with the argument that every Watt of “clean” power will be necessary in the future (thanks to their neglect).
But it is madness to invest in non-solutions that will eventually bankrupt you. We know that renewables, as currently available, fail – or fail relatively - all the tests which are applied to nuclear: reliable, continuous, clean and economic – and if many more wind turbines collapse there will be serious queries about their safety. Yet the politicians persevere with them at enormous cost.
John Hutton could not go nuclear without proposing a vast – and probably unrealisable - expansion of offshore wind power and launching another investigation into the feasibility of a Severn barrage. It’s feasible all right – but is it acceptable and economic, given several hours of slack water between tides?
EU in dreamland
And now the European Union has had a serious lapse into dreamland. It is not just that Andris Piebalgs, the Energy Commissioner, has signed up as a member of Greenpeace, judging from his speech to the EU’s Energy and Environment Law and Policy conference in Brussels on January 17; just look at the EU’s proposals for tackling climate change, announced on January 23.
It seems that the Commission has forgotten its earlier nuclear realism and ignored the recent overwhelmingly pro-nuclear vote in the Euro- Parliament. Instead, it wants 15 per cent of UK energy (not just electricity) from renewable sources by 2020, with massive implications for the countryside and coast and costs. It has also blithely demanded 10 per cent of road transport fuels from biofuels by 2020 – in the face of expert opinion that biofuels can be more damaging to the environment than the fossil variety.
Targets two a penny
It is true that a reformed EU emissions trading scheme (ETS) is at the heart of EU climate policy which, by putting a price on carbon, should help the nuclear it evidently now ignores. But, given the utter profligate uselessness of its existing ETS scheme – and the EU’s inability to make much stick in member-states – we have to wonder whether they are now living with the fairies.
Is it any wonder we doubt the Government’s gritty determination to go nuclear when John Hutton (Industry), Hilary Benn (Environment) and Ruth Kelly (Transport) queued up to gush about this EU initiative. Incidentally, it imposes beyond the sectors covered by the ETS a 16 per cent cut in UK greenhouse gas emissions on 2005 levels by 2020. Targets far beyond the political lifespan of those setting them are now two a penny.
We are tempted to suggest that when their political successors find all this impossible – and impossibly expensive – they will quietly drop the targets or, notwithstanding the political steam now invested in climate change, discover there is no problem. You can already see the makings of an escape hatch in the form of the reported lack of further global warming since 1998.
ADVANTAGE NUCLEAR I
n this atmosphere it seems desirable to remind SONE members of a few arguments in favour of nuclear. We particularly like one contributed by one of our patrons, Professor James Lovelock CH, in his book, The Revenge of Gaia: “An outstanding advantage of nuclear over fossil fuel energy is how easy it is to deal with the waste it produces. Burning fossil fuels produces 27 thousand million tons of carbon dioxide yearly, enough…to make, if solidified, a mountain nearly one mile high and with a base 12 miles in circumference. The same quantity of energy produced from nuclear fission reactions would generate two million times less waste and it would occupy a sixteen-metre cube. The carbon dioxide waste is invisible but so deadly that if its emissions go unchecked it will kill nearly everyone. The nuclear waste buried in pits at the production sites is no threat to Gaia and dangerous only to those foolish enough to expose themselves to its radiation”.
Cost comparisons
For the economically minded we have dug out a number of estimates of nuclear’s competitiveness which grows no less with the elevated prices of oil and gas.
Royal Academy of Engineering (April 2004, pkWh) – gas turbine 2.2, nuclear 2.3, coal 2.5- 3.2, onshore wind 3.9 but 5.4 with backup; offshore wind 5.5 but 7.2 with backup; poultrylitter 6.8, marine technologies 6.6.
OECD and IAEA joint report (March 2005, discount rate 5 per cent, Euro-cents/kWh): generating cost – nuclear 2-4; coal 3-5; gas 4-6; wind about 8. With a 10 per cent discount rate nuclear was cheaper than coal in seven out of 10 countries and cheaper than gas in all bar two.
World Nuclear Association (December 2005, analysis of governmental and academic studies which attached no weight to carbon reduction or security of supply, US $MWh): 5 per cent discount rate – nuclear 21-31; coal 25-50; natural gas 37-60; with a 10 per cent discount rate – nuclear 30-50; coal 35-60; natural gas 40-63.
Talepiece
If the objective is to reduce carbon emissions, nuclear is even cleaner per unit of output than wind (in 1999 ETSU put the figures at 4 and 8 grams respectively). Nuclear also displaces fossil fuels whereas intermittent renewables in the end rely on them. The moral is that if you’re serious about tackling global warming in an economical way, go nuclear.
PRICE PAIN
Suddenly, the juxtaposition of the Government’s nuclear and the European climate change policy announcements and roaring price increases by the gas and electricity companies has brought consumer bills into sharper focus. This is not to mention Chancellor Alistair Darling running to Ofgem, the energy regulator, over gas and power prices.
The Express headlined a January 24 story about the EU climate change programme, requiring Britain to raise its renewable energy output seven-fold, “How going green will add £730 to energy bills”. It said Jose Manuel Barroso, Commission president, admitted that by 2020 the programme would cost each individual about £111 a year or a family of four about £450.
But the free market think tank, Open Europe, predicted that hitting the EU renewables target would cost each household anything from £330- £730 a year, with another £50-65 on top from the biofuels targets.
A week before the EU announcement, Ofgem said environmental measures were already adding £60 to the average household bill – with more to come this year. This estimate took in the ETS, the renewables obligation subsiding “green” electricity and carbon emissions targets.
Green and gold uranium
Why pay all this when nuclear, already the cheapest source of electricity, will actually avoid the use of fossil fuels and do a far better job at combating greenhouse gas emissions than any single one of the proposed panoply of measures? It is question we must ask. You have to wonder why not a single politician, so far as we know, has yet put this to his constituents? Get green and rich with nuclear.
They should be very receptive to this message on Anglesey, on the Essex marshes and on the Cumbrian coast. After all, they are lobbying like mad for a replacement for Wylfa in North Wales.
Even anti-nuke Peter Hain backed it before he had to resign as Welsh Secretary. Bradwell villagers have let it be known they would welcome a new nuclear plant rather than a wind farm. And covetous eyes are being cast on Sellafield for a replacement for Calder Hall.
SCOTLAND THE DAFT
With its well-known independence of mind, the Scottish Parliament voted 63-58 to block any new nuclear power stations north of the border a week after the Hutton pro-nuclear announcement.
The Energy Minister, Jim Mather promptly said: “Scotland’s energy future is bright”. The Conservative leader, Annabel Goldie, retorted that it could be dark, with black-outs on the cards. What is interesting is that a YouGov poll recently found 70 per cent of Scots in favour of a mix of energy sources, including nuclear, and the hammering the Scottish SNP administration is getting for claiming the country could cope without its two nuclear power stations.
Professor Wilson Sibbett, until recently the Scottish Executive’s chief scientific adviser, warned Alex Salmond, First Minister, that the SNP had left itself open to “horrendous” political flak if it was no longer able to produce enough electricity to sustain itself.
“The SNP view is all very well in theory but in reality it doesn’t work”, he added. “Our established nuclear technology has a lot of things going for it. There could well be an energy gap.
Even the most avid anti-nuclear SNP person will not like it if the lights are switched off”.
Illogical
Even more telling is a paper produced by J L Gray, a retired chief engineer with the SSEB and member of the SNP. He tells Mr Salmond in no uncertain terms that nuclear power should be an accepted option for base-load plant. And in developing his argument he refers to the SNPs’ 2007 manifesto which said: “As a starting point, a Scotland led by the SNP will say no to new nuclear power stations”. He comments: “Translation: ‘We will reduce carbon emissions and get rid of the biggest producer of carbon-free energy we have’. How illogical can you get?”.
BROADCASTING
Your Secretary has been kept busy arguing the case for nuclear, in particular speaking to the Reform Club’s political committee and doing battle on BBC’s Newsnight with Zac Goldsmith and Professor Tom Burke, of Imperial College, in advance of the Government’s nuclear announcement.
The former was the more satisfying. Just as the Government’s announcement flushed out unsuspected nuclear supporters, so the Reform’s high-powered group received the message surprisingly quietly. Not even the following paragraph had him blackballed as a member: “It is pure, unadulterated hooey”, he said of the Green, Liberal Democrat and Nationalist renewable, CHP, micro-generation and efficiency alternative. “But it is such dangerous hooey…that I feel obliged to warn anybody and everybody that those who proclaim it are enemies of the people. They are leading them up a garden path that will leave us in the dark, impoverished and our lives shattered by social and economic breakdown. Modern civilisation cannot manage without electricity at the flick of a switch”.
Newsnight with Jeremy Paxman was a different proposition. This was primarily because it was preceded by a nuclear-hostile scene-setter and had a mob-handed panel of four for a mere 10- minute discussion. It was, however, satisfying to have the anti-nuke Prof. Burke having the last word - giving the UK full marks for the safe operation of nuclear power.
TARDY TREASURY
We thought you would like to know that after five months we have received a reply from the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Well, not quite the Chancellor, only a double-barrelled name in Corporate and Private Finance. You may recall we wanted to know back in July why the Treasury had then been sitting for 10 months on an application from the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate for funds to engage inspectors to license new reactors.
The reply, penned during the pre-Christmas clean up on December 20, did not answer that question. Instead, it demonstrated the Government’s nuclear commitment by virtuously recording that the NII began advertising for inspectors in The Times on December 11. Let us be grateful for small mercies.
PLUTONIUM
We shall very shortly be sending members a new briefing note “Plutonium in Perspective” which sets out the facts about this controversial but immensely valuable element. We hope that you will give the leaflet the widest circulation in view of the prevalence of plutonium myths. Copies can be obtained from the Secretary on
or on 020-8660- 8970.
