At the beginning of June 2010 the coalition government appears to have got off to a promising start. There has been one glitch in the treasury department and of course the overriding problem of major national deficit poses a threat of significant but unspecified proportions. Otherwise the two political parties, the Lib Dems and the Tories, have compromised in a constructive way to produce a harmonious whole. As you might expect one of our major concerns is what will happen to the development of nuclear power generation; we hope that it will be stopped dead in its tracks.
Our reading of the original manifesto policies in this area gives us hope. The Lib-dems, alone amongst the three parties, declared that they were opposed to maintaining the nuclear option. However the Tories, in their nominal support for replacement and expansion, placed the caveat that such developments should be done without involving public money. This condition sounds like a complete killer because history shows that it has proved impossible anywhere in the world to develop nuclear power without enormous state subsidies.
Also, building nuclear power stations is one thing but finding a way to store the pernicious waste products is quite another. We are not aware of any satisfactory solution that has been found in any country. Theoretical possibilities have been proposed but under scrutiny the methodologies have always been exposed as having serious weaknesses. In short, producing power by nuclear technology inevitably leads to major and unacceptable legacies for future generations.
While this deadly legacy is the main reason for our rejection of the nuclear option there are other weighty reasons for objection. Dangers of obtaining raw materials, the fact that these materials are finite and controlled by foreign interests, decommissioning of plant after only a few years and operational security are examples. Then there are the more mundane arguments based on simple economics: the track record shows that building nuclear reactors results in costs that are commonly over budget and furthermore they cannot be delivered on time.
Chris Huhne is the new energy and climate change secretary and to us that sounds like a good thing. However, he is already showing some weakness in pursuing the Lib-dem manifesto policy. It seems that his main objection is based on purely economic grounds and he has said that otherwise he is not dead set against nuclear power in principle. Both politicians and commercial enterprises (like those proposing to build power stations) are past masters at creating and finding loopholes; this gives us room for concern.
For example, would the zero public cost criterion include decommissioning and waste storage expenses? If so then, in our opinion, nuclear power generation is dead in the water but we fear that such details could be ignored or circumvented maybe on grounds of false promises.Then there is the issue of carbon pricing. It could be raised to such a level that some necessary competing sources of energy, mainly gas and oil, would become so expensive that nuclear power could be favoured. Make no mistake, raising the price of carbon substantially is a good thing and we would support it strongly. However the favoured alternative sources should be true and relatively benign renewables namely water, solar and wind, not nuclear.
What is the other good news? The coalition is headed on a course to support maritime power, let's hope they do this with enthusiasm. Feed-in tariffs are due to be followed up (originally a labour initiative under Ed Miliband) and these could produce a real culture change. Germany has already shown how successful they can be and we believe these could be the real stimulus to foster, for example, distributed PV generation (solar). Maritime and solar PV energy sources are not yet used significantly but they hold the promise of massive benefits if they are supported vigorously. Subsidise them? Yes, but the costs would be small compared to nuclear development despite claims made by EDF Energy (French, state-owned company). You've only got to look at the ongoing costs of existing nuclear programmes to put that in perspective*. Furthermore as solar and water power generation mature the scale and developed technologies would allow the subsidies to be withdrawn.
* PS: By coincidence on the day following this article Chris Huhne reported to The Guardian, referring to the very high costs of decommissioning existing nuclear facilities; "my department is not so much the department of energy and climate change, as the department of nuclear legacy and bits of other things". He went on to declare that "it underlined the need to ensure that any new nuclear stations had watertight agreements that debar all public subsidy".
In our opinion this fact rules out new nuclear power and even then no one is seriously addressing the problem of waste storage. |
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