This week’s announcement by John Hutton of a new generation of nuclear power plants sparked some lively exchanges in the House of Commons. Following my observations, the Secretary of State offered me a bold print version ‘to help me understand it’, and said the best emissions to cut down would be the ones from my mouth! So a good consensual start then…
Given that opinions vary considerably both between parties and within our party about new nuclear, I thought it might be helpful to offer a bit of background to our judgment that new nuclear plants are not what we need in response to the energy issues facing the UK.
The first thing we all want to see is security of energy supply, but new nuclear does not really address the key concerns. As far as ‘keeping the lights on’, the shortfall in total capacity is likely to occur long before new nuclear could be seriously on stream – realistically put at 2020 at the earliest. We need new energy sources long before 2020 and time and money diverted to prepare for new nuclear could actually be a distraction from this goal. As regards problems with overseas energy sources, the main concerns are oil and gas imports, but new nuclear electricity is not much of a substitute for either unless our transport and heating needs start to be met in very different ways.
The other goal is to get our energy in a way that drastically reduces CO2 emissions. Leaving aside the fact that new nuclear build and operation is hardly ‘carbon-free’, there are better ways to achieve this desirable goal. These include much greater use of renewable sources (as many other European countries are doing), serious action on energy conservation and efficiency, and a serious look at ‘carbon capture’ technologies which could mean our remaining gas and coal stations could be operated in a much less damaging way.
The Government claimed yesterday that the new nuclear stations would need no public subsidy, but the small print already shows that they are paving the way for backdoor subsidies through pricing and help with clean-up costs. It is hard to believe that private companies will invest for decades in the face of uncertain liabilities, especially when the Government has still to be specific on exactly how the waste will finally be disposed of.
The statement yesterday was a clear signal to the nuclear industry that the Government will give them the guarantees that they seek, and those guarantees have an economic value which would be better spent on alternative strategies that would yield faster results and be more flexible and more sustainable.
Steve Webb MP is Lib Dem Environment & Energy Spokesperson. The Liberal Democrat petition against nuclear power is at ourcampaign.org.uk/no2nuclear
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8 Comments
OK Steve, I’m happy to trust that we have a coherent policy. But one thing I do object to is the scaremongering that often surrounds nuclear power. So would you be prepared to make it clear that nuclear is not the most dangerous method of power generation on the planet, as some Liberal Democrats have claimed? That it is in fact the safest method?
It is good to see LibDem positive policies put clearly.
Apart from coming producing power late, the troubles with nuclear power are:
1. Nobody knows how safe/dangerous nuclear power is as compared to other forms of generation. The proper calulation/analysis of risk over the whole life of the plants and their waste can be done to a rough approximation; but never has been properly done. I suspect both supporters and opponents of nuclear power are frightened of what the results might be.
2. Equally, there are no thorough and properly checked costings (neither in cash nor in carbon equivalents) of nuclear power as compared to the equivalents over the whole life of the plants and their waste. I suspect that the nuclear supporters are frightened of these calculations; quite possibly needlessly frightened.
Until the government has come forward with checkable authoritative calculations on these counts, we have no grounds for thinking that they know what they are talking about. Given the record of economy with the truth in past Labour and Conservative government statements on nuclear policy, and given New Labour’s ten year record of deciding first and finding out what is wrong with the policies afterwards, how can any reasonable person accept John Hutton’s emotional conversion to the “nuclear faith” as a sensible base for national or international policy? Still less can we accept that there really is no hidden subsidy from public funds.
“These include much greater use of renewable sources (as many other European countries are doing)…”
Really? Which ones Steve? Which countries are using renewables to replace their base power requirements successfully.
I defy you to name one.
DK
Why is no one making more of Brown’s brother being an employee of EDF?
Re 3: The argument about renewables and baseload is an interesting one. What you need, of course, is predictability and (controllable) variability so that you can cope with peak demand. With nuclear that can’t easily be turned up/down you have to have variable sources that you can bring on stream or not according to demand. Any individual wind farm (say) may be hard to predict, but predicting the total output from your renewable sources in aggregate may be relatively straightforward – for example, the tide is pretty predictable! And in any case, if using more renewables is such a problem re ‘baseload’, how come many other major European nuke-free countries have already managed big increases in renewables without wrecking their energy management?
Interestingly the Swedish sister party of Liberal Democrats, Liberal People’s Party, just yesterday demanded that Sweden should build more nuclear energy and give up developing ethanol fuel, which isn’t seen as an efficient way to meet the increasing demand for energy and the climate change.
I have a very big problem seeing renewables in the baseload power supply.
On a windless, cloudy day with the moon at it’s quarter (neap tides) we have significantly reduced power generation from all current renewable sources.
We need a basic level of power generation that is consistent and not dependent on the vagaries of nature.
Currently I see only 2 sources available to us; Fossil fuels and fission.
Fossil fuels throw masses of CO2 into the atmosphere. Nuclear throws nothing. Disposing of the fuel in nuclear is an issues, but then finding fuel in the first place is an issue for fossil power plants.
In the future we might have orbital solar farms that can beam energy by microwave to the earth in any weather but that is decades (a century?) away at best.
Until then it’s a choice between increasing CO2 in our atmosphere from quickly diminishing fuel reserves or using nuclear power.
Not the best of choices… but I can’t see how we can turn our back on nuclear power.
Oh.. and Steve… you’ve not answered #3′s question. Name a country please.
Nuclear is such a fraught issue, especially as it is tied up with nuclear weapons and Chernobyl.
I think the risks are pretty well understood and are minimal. A Chernobyl won’t happen with modern reactors (or even any the UK has used).
The designs we use are, for example, designed to need supervision to run rather than supervision to stop and won’t let you do such stupid things to them.
Emergency procedures are also far more developed with the ability to shut down a reactor if the slightest thing looks wrong.
The CO2 argument is a complete canard – everything will cost CO2 to build and maintain. It also doesn’t take into account other environmental and human factors like those associated with biofuel.
Costing carbon emissions or trading emissions is probably the best way to work out what’s most effective.
Decommissioning of new reactors will be easier and cheaper as well, we’ve learned a lot through the decommissioning of old reactors. I do object to government being last resort here though – every station should perhaps have insurance to cover decommissioning costs in the event of the company not having enough money (or perhaps decommissioning assurance?)
Transmission loss is often brought up – but recent experience shows that wind power is not effective in most local settings, so you need large remote farms. Solar may be effective locally, and I think it will become more so in the near future.
Ironically, nuclear may become a local energy form with the development of small sealed reactors for energy production in remote areas.
My central problem with the current nuclear plans is they’re centrally directed. Bringing things into the realm of politics like this distorts things so much its not clear what the advantages and disadvantages are.
Like you I also don’t trust the government when it says no subsidies will be needed… (I also don’t agree with subsidy for renewables either though – its the same distortionary effect which could end up wasting lots of money and delaying the production of better solutions)