from Sunday Herald, 15 November 2009
Attempts by Scottish ministers to clean up coal so that it can replace nuclear power will lead to massive amounts of pollution and wreck the government’s targets to combat climate change.
A new analysis reveals that the £2 billion “clean” coal plant proposed for Hunterston in North Ayrshire would end up belching over 100 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over its lifetime.
Last week, the UK government gave the go-ahead to ten new nuclear power stations across England and Wales. None were proposed in Scotland, though, because of opposition from the Scottish government.
Instead, Scottish ministers have made it clear that they want to build new coal-fired power stations, fitted with carbon capture and storage technology to curb their pollution. On Monday, the Scottish finance secretary, John Swinney, announced that any new coal station would have to capture carbon from 300 megawatts of its electricity generation from the first day of operation.
But the new coal plant planned at Hunterston by Clydeport’s owners, Peel Holdings, is going to generate 1,600 megawatts of electricity. That means that four-fifths of the plant will produce pollution as usual - millions of tonnes of it every year for many years.
According to an expert analysis for the World Development Movement, this will result in over 100 million tonnes of carbon dioxide being belched into the atmosphere over 40 years. The campaign group is concerned that this will worsen the plight of poor countries already suffering from the floods and droughts caused by climate change.
Swinney is being far too timid on carbon capture and storage, said the group’s Scottish campaigner, Liz Murray. “It is nowhere near ambitious enough to ensure the kind of cuts in carbon dioxide that are needed to meet the targets set in the government’s climate change legislation,” she argued.
“There can be no place for new coal power in Scotland, unless it is fitted with 100% carbon capture from day one. In the same way that the Scottish government went one better than Westminster with its climate change targets, it should now also aim to show them what is possible by completely ruling out dirty coal.”
The Scottish government, however, dismissed the warnings about coal pollution as “speculation”. Scotland was determined to become Europe’s leader on carbon capture and was working to create a low-carbon economy, insisted energy minister, Jim Mather.
“Our position strikes the right balance between short-term security of supply, ensuring demonstration of carbon capture and storage technology and making progress towards our ambitious carbon reduction targets.”
Mather argued that Scotland needed new coal-fired power stations, but not nuclear reactors. “New nuclear power stations are dangerous, expensive, unreliable and unnecessary,” he said.
But this has been dismissed as “incompetence and dogma” by the Scottish Labour leader, Iain Gray. His East Lothian constituency includes the Torness nuclear power station.
He argued that without nuclear power, Scotland would have to buy in electricity, or rely on coal or gas. “The rest of Britain will be less reliant on energy supplies from overseas and there will be substantial environmental benefits,” he said. “The SNP has let Scotland down.”
But according to one recent study, both the SNP and Labour could be wrong. It is in fact perfectly possible for Scotland to do without building any new coal or nuclear stations, the study concludes.
Carried out by the Glasgow-based energy consultants, Garrad Hassan, it says that by 2030 Scotland could meet between 60% and 143% of its annual electricity demand from renewable energy. Exactly how much depends on the levels of investment in saving energy and boosting renewables.
“Our analysis shows that if you shut down Scotland's nuclear power stations - and the old coal station at Cockenzie - you would still have enough electricity generation in 2030 to meet peak demand in Scotland under most scenarios,” said Garrad Hassan’s Paul Gardner.
“Of course it depends a great deal on how much electricity demand rises or falls, but it's difficult to foresee a situation in which nuclear power stations would be essential north of the border.”
This was possible, argued Gardner, because Scotland was “blessed with an abundance of wind, wave and tidal power”. It was different in England, however, where it “made sense” to build nuclear stations close to areas of high demand in the south.
At the moment Scotland depends on nuclear reactors at Hunterston and Torness to generate about a quarter of its electricity. But Hunterston is due to be closed in 2016 and Torness in 2023.
The suggestion that Scotland might sometimes be relying on nuclear electricity from England was “somewhat philosophical”, Gardner said. “In most scenarios, on average over a year, there would be a net export to England,” he explained.
“There would be times, when the wind wasn't blowing, that you would need to import power from England, but equally there would be other times when you would be exporting power to England.”
Gardner’s view was backed up by the environmental groups which commissioned his analysis. The idea that Scotland would be reliant on imported nuclear power was “based on a fundamental misunderstanding of electricity generation systems,” said Duncan McLaren, the chief executive of Friends of the Earth Scotland.
He also challenged the “propaganda” that nuclear power would be good for Scottish jobs. "Far from creating sustainable employment, building nuclear power stations in Scotland would starve our renewables industry of finance, engineers, construction capacity and more,” he said.
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