Michael Meacher MP

So BP lobbied the British Government for the release of Abdel Basset  al-Megrahi, the alleged Lockerbie bomber, in order to get prior access to Libyan oil – or so say 4 US Senators.   Al-Megrahi was almost cetainly not the culprit;  the bombing was much more likely to have been carried out by the Iranian-backed Ahmed Gibril’s revolutionary Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – but that’s another story.     The deal that was hatched whereby Libya would give up its nuclear ambitions (which showed no sign of materialising anyway), Al-Megrahi would be released on compassionate grounds that he was in the final stages of a terminal illness (which we now know he wasn’t), and Britain would graciously respond to these magnanimous gestures of goodwill from Libya by opening up its markets to Libyan goods (i.e. grabbing the oil).

Jack Straw, earlier Foreign Secretary, openly admitted as much.   He said last year: “We wanted to bring Libya back into the fold.   And yes, that included trade…and subsequently there was the BP deal”.   No country oozes high-mindedness to cloak its base commercial interests like the UK.   Indeed this motif has been played out repeatedly. (more…)

Well, well, well, it’s taken Vince Cable just 18 days in government to do a complete U-turn on the most fundamental issue for the British economy which will dominate British politics for the next decade.   He repeatedly and vehemently argued in Parliament over the last two years and through the election campaign right up to election day that immediate spending cuts could knock the fragile economic recovery on the head and risk a double-dip recession.    Less than 3 weeks later he’s just announced he’s changed his mind and is now pursuing the opposite policy, falling in line with the Tories.   It’s amazing what government can do to you – one of the fastest turnarounds on a fundamental point of principle in moder politics.

But he’s not the only one.   Chris Huhne, the new Energy secretary, who as Liberal Energy spokesman before the election rejected any new nuclear build as his party have always done, told us in his first interview after his appointment that he still opposed nuclear power, but that in deference to the coalition agreement it would still proceed provided there was no public subsidy.   And he clearly hinted that without public subsidy he didn’t believe it could go ahead at all.   Now, 3 weeks later, it’s all changed. (more…)

The big energy companies are notoriously quick to put up petrol prices when wholesale oil prices rise but equally slow to put them down when oil prices fall, thus making large unwarranted profits at consumers’ expense by keeping prices sticky at the high end.   Now another market scam in energy supply has been unearthed by Which? in this month’s current issue.

CERT, the Government’s Carbon Emissions Reduction Target, requires the Big 6 – British Gas, EDF, Eon, Npower, Scottish & Southern, and Scottish Power – to help customers install energy-saving measures.   So far, so altruistic.   But that’s not how it ends up.

First, the most effective way of saving energy is solid wall insulation for Britain’s 6.6 million old and poorly- insulated solid-wall properties which could save a typical household’s gas bill by £420 a year.   But the companies don’t do this because under CERT rules customers have to stump up 80% of the cost  which can be around £7,250 for a typical home.   Instead they mail-out unsolicited light bulbs – a staggering 182 million of them – which save each household just £14 each year.   This invalidates the whole purpose of the exercise.

Second, and worse still, customers don’t realise – and are certainly not told – that they themselves are paying for these ‘benefits’.   The regulator Ofgem has recently estimated that the average household pays no less than £84 a year in ‘environmental levies’ on its energy bills, of which £45 goes directly towards funding CERT.   In other words, customers are being forced to fund carbon reduction out of their own (squeezed) budgets, and because the Government keeps no check on how this £45 is spent, it has minimalist impact in cutting carbon, but leaves the companies with large unearned profits.

Not bad for two scams – and more to come.

Though very few people know it – and of course it’s not being reported anywhere – the Government’s planned nuclear renaissance cannot go ahead unless it is formally and officially ‘justified’.   This was defined by Defra as “no practice involving exposures to radiation should be adopted unless it produces sufficient benefit to the exposed individuals or to society to offset the radiation detriment it causes”.

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Having for months advocated a strong State stake in energy supply, I was pleased – if admittedly rather surprised – to see that Ofgem is now recommending exactly that. It’s almost as though it was recommending rolling up the unfettered free market system of liberalised energy and replacing it with the Central Electricity Generating Board. And about time too. Privatisation of gas in 1986 and electricity in 1989 certainly lowered prices, but at the expense of strategic long-term planning. Three consequences have followed from the wild marketising frenzy of the 1980s which are now seen even by the Energy Establishment to be lethal drawbacks. First, gas storage capacity when left to the market scarcely materialised , which left the UK with dangerously low reserves in cold snaps like the recent one and increasingly dependent on imported gas. Second, the disinterest in ownership of strategic national assets put the UK at the maercy of foreign power behemoths which again mattered at times of shortages and rationing when they would prioritise their own domestic consumers. And third, having sucked the short-term profits out of the industry, privatised companies are much less interested in investing to meet national energy supply targets.

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With gas storage supply in the recent cold snap down to dangerously low levels in the UK and far lower than in France or Germany, with coal carbon capture and storage (CCS) still at least a decade away, and with renewables still unlikely to meet even the modest 15% electricity generation target set for the UK by the EU for 2020, Government energy policy is becoming heavily dependent on its planned revival of nuclear. Yet it is already becoming clear that the conditions it has laid down for this nuclear renaissance are make believe. The UK Government has confirmed a few months ago that it is sticking to the cost estimates on which it based its forecast that nuclear was cost-effective with an average carbon price of 36 euros per tonne of carbon, and that plants could be built for only £1,250/kW (or about $2,000/kW). Neither of those conditions are realistic. As the UK Department of Energy (DECC) said in the Commons statement of 9 November last year: “We agree with the EU that there are significant risks in attempting to manage the carbon price. Introducing price caps or floors makes emissions trading a game of betting on the next government intervention in the market”. Quite so. Nor is the other condition any more soundly based.

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The revelation that the main safety regulator, HSE (the Health and Safety Executive), cannot approve the current nuclear reactor designs which are central to the Government’s intended nuclear renaissancecarries enormous implications. The leading designs come from the French companies, which make the EPR reactor, Areva and EDF, and the US multinational power comapny, Westinghouse, which produces the AP1000 reactor. The HSE report identifies several safety concerns. One focuses on the non-separation of the safety protection system from the control system on the EPR reactor, such that a fault on one could disable the other as well. Second, the EPR has a concrete shell encasing the nuclear reactor where the steel cables are grouted over, preventing maintenance checks as the reactor ages, whereas British practice is that the steel cables should be able to be inspected and removed. Third, there are problems with the positioning and operation of fire doors and alarms. HSE also believes that the Westinghouse safety case has significant shortfalls, with questions also about the mechanical engineering and structural integrity. These are not minor points. The implications for the Government’s plans to have new nuclear plants up and running by 2017 are devastating.

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It has just been reported that a big-name industry organisation is complaining that a DECC-commissioned Wicks Review into energy issues complacently played down, even largely ignored, the whole question of peak oil. Given that even the International Energy Agency (IEA), which is always close to the oil industry, is now fiercely debating within its own ranks how soon the oil will run out, which would herald an unparalleled economic dislocation for the world economy, this head-in-the-sand approach seems bizarre. Is this because lead elements in the oil industry, and particularly the US, are keen to talk up the availability of oil supplies lest a panic sends the present precarious global economic recovery into a tailspin? Certainly whistleblowers have claimed that there is political pressure from the US to massage projections of future oil reserves and production levels, though such claims have been rejected by the IEA. Whatever, this is an issue which it would be suicidal to duck, given its implications.

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Today’s Commons statement on energy policy by Ed Miliband is an act of faith which is pitted with flaws which remain unanswered and even unheeded. On renewables, he noted that offshore wind generation increased by two-thirds last year and onshore by a quarter, without admitting that together they still contribute only 2% of electricity generation, the lowest by far in the EU except for Malta and Luxemburg, and not remotely within reach of the 30-40% target needed by 2020. On his oxymoron of ‘clean fossil fuels’, he revealed that his plans depended entirely on deploying carbon capture and storage (CCS) on all new coal-fired power stations by 2020, without acknowledging that no CCS prototype exists anywhere in the world and both the technical viability and commercial cost-effectiveness of CCS remain wholly unproven, that dirty post-combustion coal projects will continue till at least 2020, and that a large levy on electricity consumers will be necessary to get 100% retrofit of CCS. But the heart of his statement concerned nuclear, and here most clearly his case is built on a wing and a prayer.

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After years of denying that the planned nuclear renaissance would be subsidized by the taxpayer, the Government has been forced to backtrack, pressed into a U-turn by industrial blackmail, particularly from the French company EDF. It appears that the nuclear companies have been told that if the Copenhagen climate change summit in December fails to deliver a significant boost to the market price of carbon (up from 13 euros a tonne now to at least 30 euros), then a new carbon levy would be imposed adding nearly 10% to the average annual electricity bill. It’s true that the tax would also benefit low carbon generators of electricity such as clean coal and renewables, but nuclear would be far the biggest beneficiary. This is a big subsidy, it would not be done except for nuclear, and it makes one wonder how much one can trust any Government commitment in the face of industrial lobbying. But despite this total reversal of policy, there are still good reasons for thinking this won’t work.

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The highly secretive nuclear industry is being forced to release the catalogue of accidents, many of them serious, which reveal just how unsafe are their nuclear plants. The contents of this damning document would not have been known but for the Freedom of Information Act. Written by Mike Weightman, the Government’s chief nuclear inspector, it discloses that between 2001-8 there were 1,767 safety incidents – 2 every 3 days on average – where about half were judged serious enough “to have had the potential to challenge a nuclear system”. They spanned “all areas of existing nuclear plant”, including Sellafield, Aldermarston, and Burghfield in Berkshire. The significance of this revelation isn’t just that it shows that nuclear plants are a great deal more risky than we thought, but that we should also question far more rigorously than we have so far done whether in future a new nuclear build renaissance should be allowed to proceed as a major source of Britain’s energy supply. The evidence now revealed indicates that it should not.

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Ed Miliband’s White Paper on the de-carbonisation of Britain is very welcome, especially its proposals to ensure that renewables secure proper access to the grid. Regrettaly however in one important respect it remains imprisoned within the traditional energy ideology of the past, namely its obeisance to nuclear as a necessary part of the energy mix ‘to keep the lights on’. This is a false claim on at least half a dozen counts. It will not keep the lights on since no new nuclear power station will be built before 2021, and Britain’s energy gap is projected for 2015-2020. It will generate unconscionable quantities of long-term toxic and highly dangerous nuclear waste for which no country has yet found a safe and secure method of disposal, and which is estimated in Britain’s case to involve up to half a million tonnes by the end of this century. Civil nuclear power risks the spread of nuclear weapons proliferation, as the current dilemma over Iran shows all too poignantly. The areas round nuclear power stations have repeatedly been shown to exhibit much higher than normal rates of cancer and leukaemia. The decommissioning and waste management of the first round of nuclear stations has been estimated by the NDA to cost at least £73bn, 5% of Britain’s entire GDP. And the risk of a catastrophic nuclear accident can never be entirely eliminated. But there is one further aspect of the nuclear record which is regularly ignored, but which demonstrates that the experience of nuclear is far more disastrous than has been admitted.

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It has hitherto been assumed, not unreasonably, that the steadily intensifying pressures on global oil supply from fast rising oil demand, notably from China and India, would be alleviated by the recession. But, alarmingly, a new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) suggests that this rather complacent assumption may not hold good even with the fall in demand due to the recession, let alone if an economic recovery put further strong pressure on global oil supply again. The most important new fact arising from the report (the first in-depth analysis of the production data from the world’s largest 500 oilfields) is that without extra investment to raise production, the annual rate of decline in these fields is now a staggering 9.1%, and even with investment, the annual rate of output decline is 6.4%. This is far higher than previously thought, and the implications not only for an economic upturn, but also for a continued recession, are stark.

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It almost defies belief that, at a time when Britain produces a far lower proportion of electricity from renewable sources of energy (just 4%, compared with 15-20% in mainland Europe and 35% in Scandinavia), the Government is now paving the way to dismantle one of the most efficient wind farms in the UK to make way for a nuclear power station. The Kirksanton site in Cumbria, where the Haverigg turbines are located, has been approved by the Government for the German-owned power group RWE to build a new nuclear power station there. This could well be one of the 11 new nuclear plants to which Gordon Brown, though not Parliament which has never been consulted, has committed himself. It is extraordinary that the Government has not automatically at the initial screening process ruled out areas for nuclear where there are already productive sites for nuclear technologies, but that no doubt reflects the virulently pro-nuclear stance of the DBERR department. What makes the decision even more perverse is that the wind-farm site has been expanded to 8 turbines through a £6 million additional investment, not least because Haverigg has an unusually high 35% capacity factor (or efficiency) compared with ab average of 30%. Nor is this the only anti-renewables stance the Government has recently taken.

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Today’s Ministerial statement paving the way for 4 new coal-fired power stations is a very questionable decision. It was announced with the triumphal flourish that the era of unabated coal was now over. It certainly isn’t. Not only will existing coal stations continue to churn out huge quantities of CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions, most notably Drax the single biggest polluter in the country, without any requirement to abate, but even the new coal stations will not abate their emissions up till 2020 if the trials of carbon capture and storage (CCS) do not work. Nor is there any guarantee they will, when a commercial prototype has never been built anywhere in the world. And if they don’t work, the Government has given no guarantee that they will close the plants.

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