commentary, 13 January 2008
Nuclear jam tomorrow: that is the Alice in Wonderland promise that the world’s reactor merchants have always made. What became apparent last week is that ministers in London have bought it.
At the heart of the long-anticipated White Paper on nuclear power published on Thursday is the belief that however bad things have been, and however bad they now are, they can only get better. So England gets to embark on a new nuclear programme.
Never mind the £70 billion bill for nuclear decommissioning, or the £20 billion cost of waste disposal or the £3.4 billion bail-out of British Energy, tomorrow it will all be cheaper. Forget the tens of thousands killed by the Chernobyl accident in 1986 or the unavoidable links to nuclear weapons in Iran, tomorrow it will all be safe.
That, of course, is not exactly how UK government ministers would put it. But it is the essence of what they are saying. They are asking us to believe that, despite its historic problems, nuclear power is now the best way to cut the pollution that is disrupting the climate while meeting our demands for energy.
There are some who think that the government is right, including scientists like its former advisors, Sir David King and Roger Crofts, plus the Confederation of British Industry. It would be wrong, said CBI Scotland’s director, Iain McMillan, to reject nuclear power in “an out of hand dismissal”.
But there are others who disagree with the government, including experts and environmentalists. They argue that Britain, and Scotland, can slash its carbon emissions and meet demand without resorting to more reactors.
One of the most influential critics is Tom Burke, a former advisor to three UK environment ministers and a visiting professor at Imperial and University colleges in London. The government is talking “nonsense”, he argued.
“Nuclear power can do nothing to improve Britain’s energy security or to help it meet the urgent challenge of climate change. Even if an order were placed today there would be no new nuclear electricity before 2020.”
Burke pointed out that the capital cost of nuclear power had tripled in the past three years to $6,000 a kilowatt. And in 2007, the world’s nuclear capacity increased by only two gigawatts, while wind power rocketed by 15 gigawatts.
“The much vaunted Finnish reactor, the first of the new generation of reactor designs, is already two years late after just two years of construction,” he said. “Construction costs are at least 25% greater than forecast and the whole project is more than £1 billion over budget.”
The last prime minister to attempt to do what Gordon Brown now wants to do was Margaret Thatcher. “Shortly after taking office she announced a programme of ten new reactors”, Burke recalled.
“They were to be built to avoid the danger that Britons would find themselves freezing in the dark. Fifteen years later one reactor had been built at two times its original cost. She had been defeated by the economics of nuclear power. No-one froze in the dark.”
Another of the government’s main arguments in support of a new nuclear programme was the need to reduce the UK’s dependence on gas piped in from Russia and elsewhere. But some energy industry leaders argued that this simply wouldn’t work.
“The announcement will have little or no impact on limiting the effects of our growing dependence on imported natural gas,” said Graham Meeks, director of the Combined Heat and Power Association. “The simple fact remains that 60% of the gas that we consume is used for heating, as compared to 30% in power generation.”
A series of recent studies have suggested that it would be perfectly possible for the UK to do without nuclear power. The most authoritative, drawn by the government’s environmental advisors, the Sustainable Development Commission, concluded that a combination of increased energy efficiency, renewable sources and clean coal could meet future energy needs.
“All the scenario results suggest that it is possible to meet our energy needs in a carbon constrained economy without nuclear power,” the commission concluded. It relied on a number of detailed independent studies, including one from the world-leading Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.
“The commission believes that a new generation of nuclear power stations remains the wrong option,” said the commission’s Bernie Bulkin. “The government should instead be focusing on delivering more sustainable methods of generating electricity, and on absolute reductions in our demand for energy.”
Similar studies have shown that Scotland can also manage without nuclear power. A report (pdf) commissioned from Glasgow consultants Garrad Hassan by local authorities concluded that “there are a number of options available for meeting Scotland’s energy gap without new nuclear power.”
Under a range of scenarios, the report demonstrated that various combinations of new renewables, gas and coal could replace the power generated by Scotland’s two nuclear stations, which produced just over a quarter of Scotland’s electricity output in 2006. The reactors at Hunterston in North Ayrshire are currently due to shut down in 2016, while those at Torness in East Lothian are scheduled to close in 2023.
Some of the scenarios envisaged growth in wind, wave, tidal and biomass power that “may seem ambitious but are demonstrably achievable” the report said. The maximum contribution from renewables in 2023 was given as 21 terawatt hours, compared to an estimated total Scottish resource of 215 terawatt hours.
“The Garrad Hassan report shows that Scotland can cope without new reactors,” said Edinburgh nuclear consultant Pete Roche. “Gordon Brown's nuclear plan is very unlikely to work. We'll probably find that by 2020 the UK has been unable to get any new reactors built.”
The international environmental group, WWF, has also backed studies on energy policy in the UK (pdf) and Scotland (pdf) which have concluded that nuclear power was unnecessary. “It is feasible and affordable for the UK to cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 80 per cent by 2050 whilst meeting our energy needs, without resorting to new nuclear power,” said Dr Dan Barlow, acting director of WWF Scotland.
Duncan McLaren, the chief executive of Friends of the Earth Scotland put it more bluntly. “Talk of the lights going out without nuclear power is irresponsible scaremongering,” he said.
Even some in the Labour Party ventured to depart from the party line to agree. The Socialist Environment and Resources Association in Scotland, which is affiliated to Labour, told the Sunday Herald that “a new generation of nuclear power stations is not necessary to tackle climate change.”
But the company that runs Torness and Hunterston, British Energy, took the opposite line. “We do not believe that Scotland will be able to meet its carbon dioxide reduction targets without its nuclear contribution,” said a company spokeswoman.
While new reactors at the two Scottish sites were not an immediate priority, they had not been ruled out in the future, she went on. “We have the land and they are suitable sites, with the skills and the infrastructure.”
There is no way, however, that new reactors would be granted planning permission by the current Scottish Nationalist government. It argued yesterday that its anti-nuclear stance had “fundamentally transformed” the energy debate in Scotland.
The latest figures show that the installed capacity of renewable energy in Scotland is now 2,731 megawatts, above the nuclear capacity of 2,400 megawatts. “Given our huge green energy advantages, the figures show beyond a shadow of doubt that it would be madness to go down the road of new nuclear power stations,” said a government source.
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