News from the New Party

Too little, too late, too true

At last the government has given formal approval for a new generation of nuclear power stations in the UK.  As no serious strategy for reducing large scale reduction of carbon emissions can overlook the essential contribution of nuclear power, this must on any measure be good news for the environment.  Dr Eamonn Butler comments:

Nuclear power plants are very clean. They produce very little of the carbon dioxide that fossil fuels produce. In emissions terms, one nuclear power station replacing a conventional one is the equivalent of taking thousands of cars off the road. Almost all the waste is recycled. A well-designed nuclear plant actually releases less radioactivity into the atmosphere than a coal-fired plant.

The bad news is it will take several years to get them up and running, and in the meantime Britain is increasingly dependent on foreign gas supplies. There could well be an energy crunch before the new plant is ready to take the strain.

Caroline Lucas of the Green Party also thinks the government's decision to take the nuclear option is bad news:

"Gordon Brown is guilty of the most staggering failure of political vision. The reason that Germany has 300 times as much solar power and 10 times as much wind power than the UK is simply because German politicians, led by the Greens, have had the political will to lead the way. And on energy efficiency, the government's own figures show there is the potential to save over 30% of all energy used in the UK solely through efficiency measures that would also save money overall.

"It simply isn't true that nuclear power is the answer to the so-called energy gap we face over the next 10 years, since the earliest that a new nuclear power station could come on stream is around 2017. And even if Britain built ten new reactors, it's been estimated that nuclear power can only deliver a 4 per cent cut in carbon emissions some time after 2025."

It is striking that both sides of the argument agree that a new generation of nuclear power stations cannot make a significant impact on carbon emissions, or even come into service, for a number of years.  It really is a case of "too little, too late".  But whose fault is that?

Dr Eamonn Butler continues:

Nuclear plants produce over a fifth of the UK's electricity, but many are getting old and inefficient. So they are being shut down, and by 2023 - under the policy up until now - only 4% of the UK's electricity would come from nuclear energy. Any sensible approach would have had new building programmes in place so that the power would be there long before the lights start going out.

But this is politics. Energy ministers like Michael Meacher were delighted to consign nuclear energy to oblivion: they hate it just as they hate nuclear weapons, and they loved the thought of wind and wave power doing the job instead. Which it can't. The political cowardice stems mostly from planning. Politicians fear that local people would object to new nuclear stations being built on their nice coastlines. Maybe they would. But the fact is that nuclear stations have a great deal of support from places that already have them, where they provide much-needed jobs. So rebuild and refurbishment on the same sites would not have been unpopular.

Now, however, the damage has been done. If the global warming scaremongers are right, maybe by 2015 we'll all be sweltering on a Cambridge beach rather than turning up the heating, so there won't be an energy crisis. But I'm not so sure.

The reason for the delay in upgrading our nuclear power generation capacity is therefore laid bare: political cowardice by ministers, and as Caroline Lucas indicates above, the scaremongering campaigns of the green movement internationally, which have hindered the adoption of nuclear power for decades - and thereby indirectly encouraged the increase in carbon emissions by suppressing an alternative to the continued use of carbon emitting generation technologies.

The key point to understand here is that the green movement has an agenda above and beyond power generation.  The green objective is to stop economic growth, and if possible reverse it.  Nuclear technology is a profound inconvenience to this green project.  Mark Henderson of the Times comments:

The pro-nuclear argument focuses on electricity, 20 per cent of which comes from nuclear plants that are nearing the end of their lives. Though the goal is for renewables to provide 20 per cent of electricity by 2020, that means net emissions would stand still if no replacements were built.

Opponents counter that electricity accounts for only a third of Britain’s total energy use and that nuclear will not cut carbon output from heating and transport. They often cite the Sustainable Development Commission’s estimate that new nuclear stations would reduce total emissions by only 4 per cent.

However, even if one accepts the 4 per cent figure - and the nuclear White Paper puts it higher, at 5 to 13 per cent - it is not trivial. It is roughly equivalent to taking one in three cars off the road. Were such a reduction suggested for a nonnuclear technology, the greens would be all over it.

The criticism would be justified if ministers were proposing nuclear power as the sole solution to low-carbon energy, but they are quite clear that renewables are needed, too. The Government also makes valid points about energy security, as nuclear power is not reliant on imports from politically unstable regions. Most uranium comes from Australia.

So although nuclear power may not be the only solution to low-carbon energy, it is fairly clear that no serious strategy to move to a low carbon economy can ignore nuclear power.  Those who seek to do so should no longer be given a free ride.