Michael Meacher - Labour's Future

John Hutton’s statement on nuclear power today was the woolliest, least explicit, and feeblest intoning of generalisations that I have heard in a Ministerial statement for a long time – presumably because the Government knows just how precarious and fragile their case is.

The statement failed to give any specific answers at all on all the key issues:

1 Cost. I asked: Bearing in mind that taxpayers will pay more for nuclear electricity in order to cover decommissioning costs and will still have to pay for any shortfall which could run into billions of pounds, and secondly that taxpayers will pay the massive construction costs for storing hundreds of thousands of tonnes of highly radioactive waste, and thirdly that taxpayers will be charged if necessary to guarantee a minimum price for carbon, and bearing in mind above all that the last round of nuclear build forced taxpayers to pay out £5bn to bail the nuclear industry out of bankruptcy as well as over £70bn to deal with waste, isn’t this whole nuclear project the mother of all white elephants?

None of these facts were denied. I was merely told it would be different next time.

2 Nuclear waste. As a result of existing nuclear power stations the Government-sponsored Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) thinks there will be 500,000 tonnes of radioactive waste accumulated by the end of this century. How will it be disposed of safely?

John Hutton didn’t know: leave it to the experts, even though the experts have been exploring this matter for the last 50 years and still haven’t got an answer. Storing it in repositories deep under Sellafield is the conventional answer, but that failed the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate’s safety test back in 1997, and no better solutions have been offered since.

3 Too little, too late. At present nuclear provides 19% of UK electricity but by 2020 as a result of closure of ageing nuclear power stations, that will be down to 7%. So there will be a gap of 12% or so by 2020. But not a single new nuclear power station will have been built by 2020 – even Hutton admitted that the industry’s target of 2017 was ‘optimistic’. Significantly the only nuclear plant being built in Europe at present, at Olkiluoto in Finland, is already 3 years behind schedule.

4 Climate change. Even on the best scenario, nuclear will only deliver a 4% reduction in carbon emissions by 2025 because nuclear is only relevant to a small part of Britain’s primary energy needs, i.e. for electricity generation, not for travel or space heating. Renewables have much wider application.

5 Security and safety. Hutton rather lamely said: “We are confident we have a robust regulatory framework”. In that case, how was it that two years ago there was a very serious leak of radioactive liquid at Sellafield that was large enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool, yet went undetected for 8 months?

6 Better alternatives. Britain is currently at the bottom of the EU league for generating electricity from renewables, at just 4%. Germany, France and Italy are at 10-25%, and Scandinavia is at 35-50%. Given our unique offshore island location and access to windpower capacity unparalleled in Europe, the UK could readily reach 20% by 2020 if the Government gave renewables the same backing and drive as Governments elsewhere have done in Germany, Denmark and Spain. Even the research arm of IAEA Technology admits that renewables could provide 25% of UK electricity by 2030. And combined with a 30% improvement in energy efficiency which the Government’s own advisory body, ETSU, believes is both practicable and affordable, that would provide a solution to Britain’s energy requirements which is cleaner, more competitive and more sustainable than nuclear will ever do.