LADIES, GO NUCLEAR TO AVOID SCRATCHY HEMP LINGERIE
In a fierce attack on the “eco-smugs” – as she described the fervent
believers in man-made global warming – Melanie Reid, The Times’
Scottish commentator, took the issue into the kitchen on April 21.
“Climate change is indeed a feminist issue”, she thundered. “Who will be the victims of the ecosmug; of this pious gospel of make-do-and-mend? Why, women who will have to forgo their washing machines and their dish washers, carry supermarket shopping to the bus and return to the horror of re-usable nappies”.
We’ve got news for you, Melanie. This Newsletter, while open-minded on man-made global warming, has for years assiduously warned all who would listen that the average Green would have us leading a hard medieval existence because of his – or her – irrational objection to nuclear power.
Now, the Government has belatedly put a welcome on the mat for nuclear electricity, leading to the present commercial jockeying for a piece of the action. But that does not dispose of the casualties of the political palsy of the last 10-15 years. They are to be found in every home in the land as the energy bills drop on the doormat after a colder-than-usual but historically fairly mild winter.
The consumers are being taken to the cleaners by rising fossil fuel prices, the monstrous scams that are supposed to reduce or offset CO2 emissions, the grossly expensive development of largely useless renewable sources of energy and the cynical abuse of the socalled single European energy market. All this comes on top our being required to bail out our profligate bankers and the belated discovery that when you abolish the 10p starting rate of tax – as the Government has done – the poorest will be clobbered.
It is, of course, no use crying over spilt milk. But we would be failing in our duty if we did not ask how much less the British consumer would now be having to find for electricity – and indeed energy – if governments had gone nuclear 10-15 years ago. We would now be less reliant on natural gas and, we trust, all the daft renewables schemes would have been looked at with a sharper financial eye.
If nuclear was the cheapest generating option before gas prices soared – as was demonstrated repeatedly by analyses – no competitor can touch it now. This spring many are paying a heavy and debilitating price for politicians’ weak procrastination. Women, usually the more hostile to nuclear power, should take note before they end up, thanks to the eco-Puritans, having to wear Melanie’s “scratchy hemp lingerie”.
GETTING THE MESSAGE
No sooner had we written the above than we found such diverse commentators as the Express, the Independent and the Guardian weighing in to underline the point.
The Express editor took as his cue the 14 per cent rise in gas and electricity bills so far this year and the threat of another 25 per cent increase later this summer. He said the Government’s fallback position was to blame global market conditions but it had “failed dismally to invest in alternative sources of power such as nuclear”. The “longsuffering consumer”, he said, foots the bill for a “disastrous energy policy”.
In the Independent, Dominic Lawson, former energy editor of the Financial Times, was prompted by the Government’s “fuel poverty summit” at the end of April to say that the Government itself is “becoming an active agent in the imposition of ever higher costs on the consumer”.
He had been speaking to Paul Golby, head of E.ON UK who had claimed that the EU’s policy requiring 20 per cent of Europe’s energy to come from renewables by 2020 would, because of renewables’ limited contribution to transport fuels, require 45 per cent of UK power to be generated chiefly from wind. That would raise power generation costs by £10bn, equivalent to £400 per household and put 40 per cent on annual electricity bills.
In The Guardian we also came across this telling paragraph from Simon Jenkins: “Did those pleading for wind farms really think they could ever substitute for nuclear power; or those wanting eco-towns not realise they would just add to car emissions? Did they not understand that, once the tap of public money is turned on, lobbyists will ensure it is never turned off – however harmful? If all these fancy subsidies and market manipulations were withdrawn tomorrow and government action confined to energy-saving regulation, I am convinced the world would be cheaper and a safer place”.
TIME TO COME CLEAN
Industry may not be quite so trenchant. But, not surprisingly, since it is being blamed for rising prices and harassed by the Government into subsidising the fuel poor, it thinks it about time the politicians both in the UK and Brussels came clean about the costs of current energy policies and their love affair with renewables.
The energy consultancy, Poyry, alarmingly puts the cost of meeting the EU’s target of 20% energy from renewables by 2020 far higher than Mr Golby’s £400 per household. Indeed, it multiplies it by five – £2,000 per household.
Alistair Buchan, chief executive of Ofgem, the UK energy regulator, estimates that £80 of the £1,000 annual average gas an electricity bill is already related to the environment – and says “that element of cost is only going to go one way – upwards” because of emissions trading and subsidies for renewable energy.
The rip off
With tender loving care for the consumer, Mr Buchanan has also revealed that about 25 per cent of energy bills go towards paying for the cost of networks which will need to be vastly extended if the mad rush to harness wind power continues. He adds: “We want to ensure that, if prices go up on the 25 per cent of the energy bill that we regulate, customers do not feel they are being ripped off”.
But by definition they are already being ripped off because wind power is uneconomic, generated remotely from the consumer and does next to nothing to reduce CO2, its sole justification.
We need to use all this evidence to extol the virtues in this bleaker energy climate of the one safe, reliable, continuous, clean and competitive source of power – nuclear – and the costly failure to develop it earlier.
A RECEPTIVE AUDIENCE
If the Ipsos-Mori poll published in mid-April by the FT is any guide, we nuclear supporters will find a receptive audience. It showed over the year to January that those Britons who saw the environment as their biggest concern fell from 20 to eight per cent. This intelligence was published under the headline “Greens fear voters will turn selfish in difficult times”.
That comes close to admitting that the public can only be persuaded to shell out for such nonanswers to global warming as wind power if the economy is booming. It also suggests they will be beside themselves with fury at being impoverished by soaring energy bills when they discover that this could have been avoided if politicians (of all parties) had not fallen for the fads and prejudices of the Green fanatics.
The day of reckoning is at hand – if we force the issue with our safe, reliable, continuous, clean and above all competitive alternative nuclear product.
THE TEXAS WARNING
Another example of the unreliability of wind power – generally the only substantial renewable available – comes from Texas, the USA’s biggest wind generating state. On February 27 a drop in wind generation, coupled with colder weather, triggered an emergency that caused the grid operator to cut the early evening supply to some large customers, shaving demand by 1,100MW in 10 minutes.
Wind generation in West Texas fell from more than 1,700MW to 300MW when the emergency was declared as total demand in the region rose from 31,300MW to 35,612MW. An attorney representing municipalities in North Texas said: “We can’t put all our eggs in one basket when it comes to any form of generation. We need to consider the cost and the reliability issues in addition to the environmental impact”.
The emergency was over in three hours but you can bet your bottom dollar Texas is left wondering whether the lights are going to go out when an anticyclone in winter brings a still, sharp frost, especially as more wind farms are planned.
RISING SCEPTICISM
All this concern about the rising costs of energy and the value of renewables has been joined over the past month by positive alarm about the conversion of crops into transport fuel.
Wind and solar are not yet generally seen as poor value for money but the growing of crops to process into ethanol for transport fuel has latterly become “a crime against humanity”, as a UN official has put it.
Just what benefit are they, many people are asking - a little late in the day, it must be said, since the EU requires 2.5 per cent of biofuels from April this year in petrol and diesel, 5.75 per cent by 2010 and 10 per cent by 2020.
The UN Secretary General has called for a comprehensive review of biofuels because of soaring food prices and the clearance of rainforests into crop land. The British Government is also having its own reassessment after Professor Robert Watson, chief scientific adviser to DEFRA, said on March 25 that it would be wrong to introduce compulsory quotas for biofuels in petrol and diesel before their effects had been properly assessed.
“If one started to use biofuels…and in reality that policy led to an increase in greenhouse gases rather than a decrease, that would obviously be insane”, he added.
Yes, but what’s new? Where has been the cost/ benefit rigour lying behind wind, solar, biomass, CHP and micro-generation? The whole history of the so-called fight against global warming has been pock-marked by uncritical support for any old rope and hostility to nuclear.
HYPE “BACKFIRES”
There is also some evidence that mass media efforts to raise at least American public concern about climate change such as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and the drumbeat about scientific consensus on the subject are being counter productive.
In a paper published by the Society of Risk Analysis, Kellstedt, Zahran and Vedlitz found that more informed respondents felt less personally responsible for global warming and those with high confidence in scientists showed less concern about it, presumably because they expected them to be able to deal with it.
Professor Philip Stott finds some British support for this. On February 28 the BBC reported no noticeable reduction in electricity demand on the UK’s first “Energy Saving Day” during which 24 hours people were asked to switch off electrical devices they did not need. In fact, electricity usage was 0.1 per cent above business as usual.
This followed poor audiences for the 2007 “Live Earth” concerts. The BBC then concluded viewers preferred facts not promotion.
Among other things, Stott concludes that an increasing number of people are fed up with being lectured day in and day out about their responsibility for climate change and being confronted with policies that aim to constrain their lives and always seem to raise prices and taxes. This takes us back to the price we are paying for snubbing nuclear.
THE LAWSON TESTAMENT
Lord (Nigel) Lawson, former Tory Chancellor, has just made “An Appeal To Reason – A Cool Look At Global Warming”. We are told that his book of that title could not find a British publisher so it appeared by courtesy of an American who owns the London publishing house of Duckworth.
This is astonishing since Lord Lawson does not say we should do nothing about global warming, “though doing nothing would be better than doing something stupid”. He advocates monitoring, helping developing countries to adapt should the need arise and research, but accepts this is a difficult message to get across since global warming is discussed in terms of belief rather than reason. His analysis of this phenomenon is interesting.
He says that with the collapse of Marxism and, effectively, other forms of socialism, those who, with equal passion, dislike capitalism and its foremost exemplar, the USA, have been obliged to find a new creed. For many of them, green is the new red. But he believes something much more fundamental is at work: “I suspect that it is no accident that it is in Europe that eco-fundamentalism in general and global warming absolutism in particular has found its most fertile soil. For it is Europe that has become the most secular society in the world, where the traditional religions have the weakest hold. Yet people still feel the need for the comfort and higher values that religion can provide; and it is the quasi-religion of green alarmism which has filled the vacuum, with reasoned questioning of its mantras regarded as little short of sacrilege”.
We would add that all this invariably comes with a visceral objection to nuclear power – and a price tag that is now causing political trouble.
MOVEMENT, BUT PROGRESS?
We do not pretend to know what, where, how and by whom the first new generation nuclear reactor will be built in the UK. We are currently going through the stage where the protagonists manoeuvre for advantage. Whether the Government will or will not allow a complete foreign takeover of British Energy is as clear as mud. Suffice it to say BE has perhaps as many suitors as Helen of Troy would have had had she not launched a thousand ships.
All this, we suppose, must be counted as progress since the Government has left it to the market – or not, as the case may be.
We merely record that Atomic Energy of Canada has left the field to Areva, Westinghouse and GEHitachi and that Westinghouse, which we owned until recently, is going great guns for orders – six so far – in China and the USA. We are a wonderfully generous country that forces BE into bankruptcy, sells off Westinghouse and dismembers BNFL just when nuclear acquires a new lease of global life. Others might say we are crackers.
VISIT TO NATIONAL GRID
There are still places available for SONE’s visit on June 5 to the National Grid at St Catherine’s Lodge, Bearwood Road, Sindlesham, Wokingham RG41 5BN, starting at 11am. Could members of the party be there for 10.45am at the latest? Please inform the Secretary as soon as possible if you wish to join the group on T 020- 8660-8970 or by e-mail:
The National Grid’s site is secure and the authorities require names and car registration numbers in advance, through the Secretary. On arrival, visitors are required to produce identification, preferably photographic.
For those travelling by train, you can either go to Reading or Wokingham and take a taxi (from Reading 20 minutes and Wokingham 10). By road, leave the M4 at Junction 10, follow signs to Reading (not Wokingham). After a short run on the A329M. come off at the Winnersh Triangle and turn right at the first roundabout. Then turn left at the second roundabout on to the Reading Road (Showcase cinema on your right). Take right at Sainsbury’s traffic lights , go under the bridge, left at roundabout on to Bearwood Road, past the pub and church on the left and left into St Catherine’s Lodge.
OBITUARY
We regret to record the deaths of Dr J Dickson Mabon (82), a retired member of SONE’s committee, and Thomas Tuohy, deputy general manager at Windscale who put out the 1957 fire in one of the piles there.
Dr Mabon was Minister of State in the Department of Energy in the later 1970s when Tony Benn was Secretary of State. He had been a wartime Bevin Boy and then practised as a doctor
Mr Tuohy discarded his radiation recording badge before embarking on trying to bring the Windscale fire under control. After monitoring the progress of the fire throughout the night from the top of the 80ft pile, he first used CO2 and then very riskily water to extinguish the blaze. He died in Newcastle, New South Wales, aged 90.
