We have published a number of posts in which the two candidates have answered questions on specific policy areas or for particular audiences posed by our readers:
Russia, ISIS, globalisation and the EU – Norman and Tim answer foreign affairs questions
Lamb and Farron reply to Lib Dems for Seekers of Sanctuary
Liberal Reform interview Tim Farron and Norman Lamb
Building a diverse party: the Leadership Candidates respond to Daisy Cooper’s questions
Now Green Lib Dems have published a series of posts covering a dozen or so environmental questions that they have posed to Tim Farron and Norman Lamb. You can work through them here (scroll down the page for the full list).
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15 Comments
Wait. You mean Lamb didn’t talk about his time as a (very junior) minister in the health department where he apparently revolutionised mental health care or Tim Farron’s faith?
Alex marsh 29th Jun ’15 – 4:36pm
Alex, a very pertinent question.
For the next five years and particularly during the next General Election the badge saying “I was a junior minister in David Cameron’s first government” is not going to convince many people to vote Liberal Democrat.
Tim Farron’s answer on new nuclear starts —
“..I have never been a fan of nuclear energy, and I would far, far rather have gone down a radically intensive path of developing renewables. ”
And ends —
“.. I accept the decision the party reached in 2013, which was to support the construction of new nuclear stations as long as they could be built without public subsidy. ”
That’ll do me!
Norman Lamb’s answer is “leave it to the experts”.
The most ill-advised answer I have seen from either candidate on any subject
Does NL remember what the nuclear experts said before Fukushima?
Tim’s comment actually ends: “It’s not up to government to pick specific technologies – industry has to come forward with what they believe to the most commercially viable option.”
He appears to be parroting (presumably unconsciously) the neoliberal fallacy that markets are best and reliably deliver the right answer. Not so – there are lots of other dimensions to this that escape market discipline, for instance:
1. Reactor type: PWRs (the conventional sort) are the Ford Model T of nuclear and are basically NOT failsafe – see Fukushima. Layering technology and regulation to make them safe adds to cost and doesn’t reliably work.
2. Waste: PWRs burn up only a small part of the fuel leaving the majority furiously radioactive and dangerous for 100,000s years. That’s expensive, not to mention a bad idea.
3. Financing cost: In line with it’s obsession with the government balance sheet much of the financing is to be from France and China at undisclosed but presumably expensive rates. That’s a dominant influence on cost for projects like this and can’t be really separated from the technology.
Better design concepts exist that both burn up most of the fuel (leaving little waste) and are failsafe. Unfortunately, they are not yet commercialised because it’s too big an investment for a start-up and the established reactor vendors prefer to stick with variants of what they have. In other words yet another market failure.
In short, governments have to, well, govern. They determine the context in which commercial decisions are taken so to hide behind commercial excuses doesn’t work.
“PWRs burn up only a small part of the fuel leaving the majority furiously radioactive and dangerous for 100,000s years.”
Radioactivity works in terms of a “half-life” On average, after each half-life, the radioactivity of whatever has dropped to half of what it was at the beginning. (I’m not sure how all the atoms know which ones should emit when, but no doubt someone has a theory about that) Now, if something is furiously radioactive, by necessity is giving off a lot of radiation, which means a lot of atoms are emitting per unit time, which means it has a short half life. OTOH, if something is radioactive for 100,000s of years, then clearly it has a long half life, which means that it isn’t very radioactive. Cornish granite, for example.
It’s unlikely that any PWR in the UK would be subject to tsunami like Fukushima. And remember that most coal fired power stations emit more radiation than nuclear.
I’d rather spend any money we have for this on tidal power and on-shore wind. (As neither of them said)
Dodgy physics, Jenny, but never mind. Whichever version of nuclear fission reactors we choose, they will be expensive to build, be up to 10 years late (so much for keeping the lights on) and leave yet another mess of nuclear waste with a further £10s billions clear up cost. Compared to this, Jenny is right. Stick with proven, cheap, environmentally friendly onshore wind and reliable tidal power. I would also add demand reduction by a properly subsidised home insulation scheme for older homes.
Once again, the Tories are working against both the national interest and the planet with their destruction of onshore wind in order to boost their chosen technology of fracking to aid their friends in the gas industry.
Dodgy physics indeed Jenny. Spent fuel is a concentrated cocktail of radioactive elements with a wide variation of half lives that transmute into others as they decay. So for the first few decades the heat of decay is a real problem that means cooling is necessary. Elements with longish half lives, decades or centuries, mean the waste remains dangerous for many millennia. To be ‘safe’ like granite means having half lives measured in billions of years – and even then some granites are not very ‘safe’ even though, unlike in waste, the radioactive elements are only a tiny proportion of the whole.
“It’s unlikely that any PWR in the UK would be subject to tsunami like Fukushima. “
It is LESS likely but not at all impossible. Tsunamis do happen in the Atlantic, just less often than in the Pacific. So the really daft thing to do would be to build a nuclear plant right on the coast where the shape of that coat tends to exaggerate and tidal movement like the coast of Somerset. Oh wait! That’s exactly where Hinkley Point is, separated from the sea only by a sea wall (which will become less effective if sea levels rise). It’s a disaster waiting to happen. The consequences of the unstable Cumbre Vieja (see link) failing might well be a British Fukushima.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunamis_affecting_the_British_Isles
Peter Chivall – I’m with you on renewables and economising but I’ve yet to see anyone credibly demonstrate that they are enough even with maximum rollout. That’s why we do need to look at new nuclear technologies that are walk-away safe meaning that even hit by a tsumani, terrorism or if the operators get drunk, throw all the wrong switches and leave, safety is not compromised (although economic operation would be!). There are reactor concepts that can do that, do it cheaply and also burn up all their fuel so the waste only needs safeguarding for around 300 years which is doable.
Some credible research on how fast a zero carbon britain can be achieved
http://zerocarbonbritain.com/
There’s a very strong piece from Norman Lamb here covering a lot of the top issues – http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/norman-lamb/norman-lamb_b_7693804.html
Boris Johnson’s assertion that building houses all over Heathrow would solve London’s housing crisis, needs to have timescales attached.
It would be necessary to build a replacement airport first. The pressure on housing in London and the Southeast is urgent now. There are consequential severe pressures on road and rail travel in all the Home Counties and beyond.
As outgoing mayor of Greater London he has dismally failed to meet his own objectives for housing, despite the existence of large quantities of brown-field land in London.
As incoming MP for Uxbridge he knows that the electorate in all the constituencies near Heathrow want the strongest opposition to airport expansion and that those of us who suffer from aircraft noise and air pollution from Gatwick think the same.
He likes a joke, so he should remember Flanders and Swann:
“They are are going to amalgamate all those ares south of the river.
They are going to call them Brighton.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02w13wl
Perhaps we should also remember Flanders & Swann on crossing the Atlantic: ‘Instead of bucketing aboout for a week in a sort of floating Selfridges, you just jump on a plane, 17 miles outside London at 2 o’clock in the morning.’ (That was Heathrow.)
Fortunately middle of the night flights have been abolished since the 1960s. Sadly ‘just jumping on a plane’ is a thing of the past too, with a 2-hour lead time before take-off. All leading to making rail travel (including Eurostar) more attractive for short-haul.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0616m86/david-attenborough-meets-president-obama
At federal conference Ed Davey hosted a fringe meeting on nuclear energy and spoke in the main hall. He said that he had ben overturned at a meeting in his constituency. At the time some people wondered whether the energy and climate change secretary was pushing a coalition policy through the party.
The Greenpeace spokesman was inconsistent in a way that sounded like lobbying. Greenpeace ignored the possibility of North African solar conected by cable to Spain, Portugal or Gibraltar. Ed Davey said the French were against.
This is a job for David Cameron, help Tunisia by negotiatiing successfully with President Hollande and other Heads of Government or Heads of State. Prime Minister’s Questions are at 12 noon in the House of Commons today.
Gordon,
There could well be some dodgy physics in the prediction of trans-ocean tsunamis generated by landslides. See here for many dissenting views to the Ward and Day research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbre_Vieja
Simon Day, the second author on that research, was at the time employed by the “Benfield-Greig Hazard Research Centre” at UCL. As a geologist I have always been a little suspicious of research predicting tsumanis in the eastern USA funded by an insurance company…
Hindsight (or indeed foresight, after the 1965 Alaskan earthquake and tsunami) says that Fukushima was built on a very dangerous coastline for tsunami hazard – the west coast of Japan is much safer, and the coasts of Britain safer than that.. But geology and geophysics are not exact sciences. In the case of Hinckley point I would rate the risk from terrorism higher than that from tsunamis though
landslides definitely have caused tsunamis in enclosed basins such as Norwegian fjords and the North Sea so the risk is certainly there in parts of Britain, but the physics is rather different from the Sumatran or Japan earthquakes where areas of seafloor the size of Britain rose and fell by several metres on timescales measured in seconds, with the the rupture propagating at > 5000 mph http://www.tectonics.caltech.edu/movies/outreach/sumatra/anim_rupture.mpeg
It is a bit like fracking – by all means oppose it on various grounds but not on the basis of causing damaging earthquakes in Britain….
Andrew,
My point was that tsunamis do occur in Britain for various reasons although not often enough for anyone to have good data on the overall risk or the type of event that is most likely to cause one. My guess (and I put it no higher than that) is that it’s a very small but non-negligible risk.
I agree with you that terrorism is probably a higher risk although again it’s impossible to quantify.
Therefore we should build reactors only away from possible danger zones (which could work against tsunami risk but not against terrorism) or use reactor types that are walk-away safe – which PWRs are not.
Behind this lurks a worry about the way that moderately to badly dysfunctional bureaucracies (a category that includes the UK government irrespective of party) tend to manage this sort of thing rather badly. They soon get to a stage where too much political capital is invested to change the plan so dissenting voices are ignored, dismissed as ‘troublemakers’ or otherwise side-lined. In most businesses that merely leads to malinvestment; in nuclear it is downright dangerous.