The Nuclear Stitch-Up Unstitched
God moves in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform, as the hymn once put it. Obviously today’s upending of the Government’s best-laid plans to begin a nuclear renaissance by waving through a French takeover of the nuclear holding company British Energy must rank as one of his more momentous interventions, even by his standards.
The whole saga is brim full with irony. The Government was desperate to push through this deal (and to get £4bn from the sale to reduce the colossal deficit on the public accounts), but in effect scuppered their own deal when DBERR sold off part of its British Energy stake last year. John Hutton is now reaping the whirlwind of his own obsession with privatisation and allowing market forces (i.e. private profit maximization) to determine public policy.
Another ironic twist is that the British Government is so anxious to sell off a key part of Britain’s infrastructure to a foreign State-controlled company (EDF is 85% owned by the French Government), yet rejects any idea that it should be controlled by the British State itself.
Ironically again the British Government may in the event be saved from itself. There would have been a lot wrong with this deal if it had gone through:
Since British Energy generates about 20% of the UK’s electricity, an EDF takeover would have given a foreign company a massive concentration of power in Britain’s crucial electricity sector. The quasi-monopolistic elements of this deal were always alarming.
The so-called nuclear renaissance was always based on sand. No satisfactory answer has yet been found to the fundamental problem of where to store tens of thousands of highly toxic and dangerous waste over the next millennia. Huge public subsidies would undoubtedly have been required (the cost of waste management and decommissioning the last time round has now, on official figures, reached a staggering £83bn). The risks of nuclear proliferation, terrorist attack, catastrophic accident, and cancer and leukaemia clusters have never been removed.
Even the flagship of the supposed renaissance, the nuclear plant being built at Olkiluoto in Finland, is 2 years behind schedule and costing double the estimated budget.
Maybe this nuclear collapse is a blessing in disguise. The EU has recently set down a mandatory requirement on the UK to generate at least 15% of all its energy from renewable resources by 2020. Since renewables make virtually no contribution to transport fuels and very little to space heating, this means that over 40% of the UK’s electricity generation must now come from renewables. At present it is a pathetic 4%. If the UK were to build 8-10 nuclear power stations, as the British Government and EDF intend, we would not get even remotely near our mandatory EU renewables target because it would be completely crowded out in the rush to nuclear.
However it is that the Government has been pulled back from the disaster-in-waiting of their own nuclear plans, a ray of light has now opened up for a full-scale review of what offers a long-term sustainable energy policy for the UK. And on any objective assessment nuclear is not part of it.