Security Of Supply Does Not Mean Nuclear
Proponents of civil nuclear power will use any and every opportunity to press their case. Small wonder then, that the Russia-Ukraine gas price dispute should have been so quickly deployed by nuclear power advocates. Brian Wilson, former energy minister and now a power industry consultant, told newspapers that the row highlighted the need for the UK to establish security of supply via “indigenous” sources, namely nuclear. Like many of the arguments used to promote nuclear power, this one doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny. The UK does not possess its own uranium deposits and would have to import the fuel, just as it will be importing Russian, Algerian and Norwegian gas.
A similarly weak claim was made last year, when nuclear energy advocates promoted their cause on the dubious basis that a civil nuclear power programme would be carbon neutral and was needed to ensure the UK met its Kyoto targets. Neither claim holds much water. The UK is one of only two countries within the EU (the other is Germany) who look likely to meet their obligations under the Kyoto protocol. Equally, though the actual generation process may be carbon emission free, the building of the plant – and the extraction of the ore – are far from being environmentally virtuous.
Then there is what to do with spent fuel. The National Decommissioning Agency (NDA) recently raised its estimates of the cost of decommissioning and nuclear waste management to £70,000 millions (7% of GDP!) a colossal cost to the taxpayer. Already there are ten thousand tonnes of high-level and intermediate level nuclear waste in this country, particularly at Sellafield, and a DTI white paper made clear that this would rise fifty-fold to half a million tonnes by the end of this century – even with no new nuclear build. The Government’s Committee on Radioactive waste management, is now saying that a new programme could create no less than a five fold increase in lethal long lasting highly radioactive nuclear waste. Yet no one in the world has found a safe way of dealing with it. These cannot be sensible circumstances under which to produce more.
The obvious, and desperately needed, alternative to nuclear is a massive expansion in renewable sources of energy- wind, biomass, solar, tidal and wave power. On grounds of both principle and cost, the case against nuclear power generation is strong: nuclear is far more expensive. The Government’s Performance and Innovation Unit estimated electricity generating costs from onshore wind at 1.5-2.5p per kilowatt hour by 2020, from offshore wind at 2-3p, and from gas at 2-2.3p. By comparison, generating costs from nuclear power were estimated at 2.5-4p per kilowatt hour, half as expensive again as gas and up to twice as expensive as wind. In a competitive capitalist economy that ought to be a killer point. We should ask why this is not paramount in the current argument about whether or not to restart a civil nuclear energy programme.
At present, we have the worst of all worlds. Contribution from renewable sources to electricity generation is still tiny – about 3% - because the Government has never given the renewables industry the lead that has been given in, for example Denmark and Germany. The UK government did make a clear declaration to push strongly down this route in its energy White Paper of February 2003, but has done almost nothing to deliver on the scale required. Yet the extent of untapped windpower capacity in Britain is recognised to be far ahead of both Germany and Spain, the EU’s leading markets, and on a global basis above Texas, the previously strongest market.
It is not that renewables have failed or are not up to the job. It is rather that they have never been seriously tried. Far too little has been done to deal with the principal barriers to expansion – planning blockages, aviation issues, grid network constraints, and grossly inadequate funding, all of which were correctly identified by the Energy White Paper of February 2003.
Nuclear currently accounts for about 20% of electricity generation in the UK. When all nuclear plants except Sizewell B in Suffolk are closed by 2020, the nuclear contribution will fall to some 4%. By contrast, the government is committed to achieve its target of 10% electricity generation from renewables by 2010, and has indicated its aspiration to achieve 20% from renewables by 2020, as most of the rest of Europe are intending. Renewables is the environmentally clean, cost effective, waste-free energy source for the 21sr Century. We need nuclear like a hole in the head.