[cdn-nucl-l] Britain's David Martin...

[Adam McLean <adam.mclean@utoronto.ca>]

Posted in the UK Independent on November 25, 2001 and at:
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=106622

Adam

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Charles Kennedy: Fourteen more nuclear plants? No thanks
The Government's commitment to nuclear energy makes no sense

25 November 2001
Britain, it appears, is about to see another hugely expensive phase of nuclear 
power generation. According to leaked information, the Government is proposing 
to commission 14 new nuclear reactors, while simultaneously writing off the 
£34bn cost of decommissioning and cleaning up the existing plants.

These proposals have trickled out just before the publication of the 
Government's long-awaited energy review. And they have followed hard on the 
heels of the official announcement that the dangerous and uneconomic Sellafield 
mixed oxide (MOX) nuclear fuel plant will be allowed to go ahead.

All this was slipped out – like a whole variety of other controversial 
announcements – presumably in the hope that criticism would be muted while 
political discourse is suspended in the face of the terrorist threat. In the 
wake of the 11 September outrages, the Prime Minister very properly condemned 
Jo Moore's controversial email about "burying" bad news. But some in his 
administration are apparently so addicted to spin that they can't break the 
habit.

There are two linked issues here, revealing not just cynicism in the timing of 
announcements, but ineptitude as well. Where is the "joined-up thinking" in the 
Government revealing three major new policies that effectively commit us to a 
nuclear future – without debate – just two months before it has promised to 
publish the first ever comprehensive review of the UK's energy needs?

Sadly, we have seen such incoherence in the Government's approach before. New 
Labour has run through four different energy ministers, with three different 
energy policies, and two energy reviews in four years. Many of the renewable 
energy schemes that they promoted when they first came to power are now 
mothballed because the Utilities Act has imposed almost impossible barriers for 
the generators to overcome. Across the country highly efficient combined heat 
and power (CHP) schemes that right now should be cutting carbon emissions by 
three million tons a year are standing idle – taxed and regulated to death.

We can't afford such incompetence. How Britain meets its energy needs over the 
next few decades will decide whether we can reconcile our perfectly reasonable 
wish to expand and prosper with a sustainable environment. These are two, often 
conflicting, requirements that need to be resolved and we should be making 
informed choices through public debate, without the obfuscation of spin and 
leaks.

I want to see a future where Britain is a world leader, generating ideas that 
deliver a sustainable planet to our children and our children's children. We 
won't achieve that without a sustainable society at home, and the key to that 
lies in developing the right sources of energy. Those supplies must be secure 
and they must be economic. Nuclear power is a throwback. It is neither secure, 
sustainable nor economic.

It's hard to believe the Government could be serious about building 14 new 
reactors. Side-stepping the security questions about such facilities following 
the terrorist attacks in America – and temporarily ignoring the fact that no 
one knows what to do with the waste these plants would generate – there is the 
very real difficulty that they just don't make economic sense. If you query 
that, just ask yourself why, if they are capable of making money, the banks and 
finance houses aren't clamouring to support such projects. In fact, these 
institutions sensibly prefer to concentrate on smaller, cheaper generators 
powered by gas or renewable sources. Private enterprise has shunned nuclear 
reactors all over the world; in the United States, for example, not a single 
one has been ordered for nearly a quarter of a century.

Add to this the cost of unloading the multi-billion-pound price of nuclear 
decommissioning on to the taxpayer – which those who are arguing for a new 
generation of nuclear power ignore so that they can rewrite their commercial 
case totally detached from the real costs – and the economic absurdities mount. 
I would also suggest that a decision to subsidise any energy source by £34bn 
needs rather more public discussion than we've seen so far.

There is no case for building 14 more nuclear power stations. There is no case 
for building even one more. Instead nuclear energy must be phased out.

We cannot, unfortunately, simply close down Britain's existing reactors; that 
would cause too much disruption to the country's energy supplies. But, as they 
come to the end of their safe operating lives, they must not be replaced with a 
new generation. For this is not so much a technology whose time is past, as one 
whose time never really came.

The decision to go ahead with the MOX plant at Sellafield is even more 
incomprehensible. Just three days after the 11 September attacks, the Prime 
Minister warned the House of Commons that terrorists would use nuclear weapons 
if they could and called for the trade in the technology and capability for 
those weapons to be "exposed, disrupted, and stamped out".

Yet his government almost immediately pushed through approval for starting up 
this plant. The Royal Society and leading US weapons designers say that it 
would be possible for a terrorist group to extract the plutonium from the mixed 
oxide fuel and use it for bomb-making.

Why are we taking this risk? The plant will never be economic. Not even British 
Nuclear Fuels, the nationalised industry which owns Sellafield, pretends that 
it will ever recover the £500m it cost to build and to maintain the MOX plant 
while approval to start it was sought. The best estimate of a recent study, 
commissioned by ministers, is that it might get back about a third of this over 
its lifetime.

But even this is wildly optimistic. To recover its running costs the plant will 
have to work at 40 per cent capacity; at the moment it has firm contracts for 
about a quarter of this. The lack of enthusiasm is scarcely surprising since 
its product will be much more costly than ordinary nuclear fuel, while there is 
reported to be 60 tons of plutonium already stored at Sellafield with no 
legitimate users in sight.

In place of this ridiculous obsession with long-outdated technology, the 
Liberal Democrats have answers to the questions posed by sustainability. We 
plan to expand the growth of renewable energy sources beyond the Government's 
target of 10 per cent saved from UK-based energy sources by 2010 – with a 1 per 
cent year-by-year growth of renewable power generation for decades to come. 
This would bring us sustainability for just a small fraction of the cost of 
more nuclear power. We have submitted evidence to the energy review to that 
effect – though it would now appear that its recommendations have been sunk 
before they have even been printed.

There are successful precedents. In countries such as Denmark, which has struck 
out boldly and created a renewable energy industry for its domestic market, the 
benefits are being reaped. The Danes are profiting by selling their technology 
and expertise abroad. We should be out there, too.

There are, of course, endless pressures on government; siren voices with 
seductive, but sometimes fatal, messages. The nuclear lobby is one. Labour 
should resist those voices, just as it should resist its inclinations to spin. 
Instead, it should have faith in its own energy review. Then it should set 
about laying strong foundations for a serious, sustainable energy policy for 
the 21st century, rather than lurching backwards to the discredited policies of 
the 20th.

The Rt Hon Charles Kennedy MP is leader of the Liberal Democrats