The Case against Nuclear Power

Written by Andrew Stunnell MP, Shadow Energy Spokesman on Tue 16th Nov 2004

Fifty years ago nuclear was going to produce electricity too cheap to meter. Now, three expensive generations of power plant later, it needed a £600 million bail-out to save the last private sector producer, and taxpayers will spend £50,000 million on cleaning up the mess. That's a 60 year job, employing more people than the production phase did. In the harsh world of market forces, risk assessments and business cases, no investor will touch it. No wonder the industry is glum.

However, with characteristic chutzpah, nuclear advocates are now boldly calling for shed loads more taxpayers' money, deploying arguments about security of supply, environmental benefits, and job protection.

So let's look at their case. First, not all they say is wrong. The problems climate change poses are huge, and we urgently need a world-wide consensus on greenhouse gas reductions beyond 2012. In the UK the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution called for a 60% reduction in CO2 output by 2050, now Government policy. That will be a challenge, and measures taken so far are not enough. But the nuclear lobby is wrong to claim that the optimum solution is investment in a new generation of nuclear power.

For a start, the cheapest way of cutting CO2 emissions is to use energy more efficiently. The cost of conserving a Gigawatt is much lower than that for building a Gigawatt of generating capacity. In the domestic sector, for instance, demand would be halved if all homes were properly insulated, with effective heating controls, and up-to-date appliances. Domestic micro CHP gas boilers would improve fuel efficiency by 20%, cut bills, improve home comfort, and relieve the Grid.

Lobbyists tend to dismiss efficiency improvements at the demand end. They choose to forget that although GDP has risen by 33% in the past 10 years, and real wages 21%, UK primary energy use (including transport) has risen by only 3%. Increased prosperity and lower energy use are demonstrably compatible, given the right policy mix.

Then the industry frets about the 'energy gap', and claims that no feasible rate of expansion of renewables can plug it. Nonsense. Electricity capacity margins are getting tighter but JESS says there is sufficient actual and planned capacity for some time to come. Meanwhile the scope for CHP at all scales is good, and can produce very substantial further economies in energy use and efficiency of production in the next two decades. Renewables add about 1% pa to generating capacity, giving us 50% by 2050. Wind power is intermittent, but that only becomes critical when it reaches around a fifth of total capacity in 20 years time. By then other renewables, including wave and tidal stream, will be mature enough to take the strain.

Next comes the argument that Britain is stuck at the end of an unfriendly continent and cannot rely on our suppliers. However Norwegians worry about their gas glut after 2007, whilst Nigeria is simply burning off what they cannot sell. There is currently more gas production world wide than consumers. New LPG plants and interconnectors provide some assurance that the stable flows of the last 30 years can continue for another 30, though more gas storage capacity is needed to smooth seasonal peaks.

Lastly they say that unless we go nuclear priceless skills and technologies will be lost to the UK. Actually any new nuclear plant built in Britain will have been designed abroad anyway. It would be a mass-produced tried and tested type, and certainly not another uncosted test-bed for nuclear experimentation. In fact the industry will still need a highly skilled work-force for decades, both to decommission UK plant and to help other nations struggling to clean up their nuclear mess.

What they don't say, of course, is that of all the ways of configuring the UK's power industry in 2050, about the least sensible is to build a small number of vulnerable high value targets dotted round the coast line as far from inhabited areas as possible, connected by wire to consumers a hundred or more miles away.

So what is the alternative? No-one knows what new resources and technologies will be exploited over the next fifty years, just as no-one in 1954 guessed that natural gas would be the fuel of choice by 2004, nor that real incomes would be two and a quarter times higher, GDP 234% up, and carbon emissions actually down!

One scenario would be that for every 100Gw of primary energy used today, we would save 30Gw through efficiency and conservation, with 50Gw produced by renewables, and 20Gw coming from fossil fuels. All achieved with increasing prosperity and a flourishing economy. That would lead to a reduction from 90% to 20% reliance on fossil fuels, exceeding the RCEP target. I would settle for that.