Has Blair got the guts to take the nuclear option?
Telegraph | Opinion | Has Blair got the guts to take the nuclear option?
By Bernard Ingham
(Filed: 29/09/2005)
Is Tony Blair about to discover the courage that has eluded him for eight years? Is he, for a change, going to do the right thing for Britain? I ask because he has just given Greens the vapours by telling his party conference all options are open for tackling climate change, including building a new generation of nuclear power stations.
In fact, this does not take us much further forward. Blair, reputedly pro-nuclear, has led a government that for years has ruled the development of nuclear power neither in nor out.
The most we have been promised is a decision in this Parliament. Superficially, events are moving towards a conclusion. The Government is reviewing the various elements of its strategy, including renewable sources of energy, progress with reducing greenhouse gases - or lack of it, since volumes are up for the third year running - and the nuclear option.
It has appointed a Nuclear Decommissioning Agency to clean up old nuclear sites, though its strategy, now out for consultation, implies the end of nuclear power in Britain. And its much-derided Committee on Radioactive Waste Management promises us a report next July on the favoured method of disposing of longer-term radioactive wastes, though not where to put them.
So, we have to ask if Blair, in the second half of his final term, could overcome the policy paralysis that afflicts most democratic governments as an election looms and what such a decision might be worth when he is no longer there to carry it out.
Even though the Green Party polled little more than one per cent of the vote at the last election, Labour's energy policy has been dominated by obeisance to an environmentalism that irrationally regards nuclear as deadly poison. Indeed, it can hardly be said that we have an energy policy. The dominating consideration of the Energy Policy White Paper of 2003 was reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 60 per cent by 2050. Without consulting engineers, it chose the Green route to achieve this: a combination of renewable sources of energy - wind, waves, tides, solar, geothermal, biomass, chicken muck - energy conservation and natural gas.
Coal and nuclear, which still generate about half of our electricity, were to be allowed to disappear - "dirty" coal for environmental reasons and nuclear for dogmatic ones, unless it were proved there was no alternative.
There is some evidence that the realisation is dawning that we cannot do without nuclear power - and not just because it emits next to no greenhouse gases. Renewables, required to produce 10 per cent of our electricity by 2010, can now scarcely manage four per cent and most of that is large-scale hydro-electric. Intermittent wind, effectively the only substantial renewable generator, struggles to produce 0.5 per cent after 15 years' development at enormous expense, as the Commons' Public Accounts Committee has just revealed.
Energy conservation is getting nowhere. As Fells Associates have pointed out, it has been high on the agenda for 30 years and demand has risen by 60 per cent. Electricity demand rises at 1-1.5 per cent a year.
This leaves natural gas, which is now having to be imported, since North Sea production is falling. The strategic risks of importing 80-90 per cent of our energy from such politically unstable areas as Russia, the Middle East, Algeria and Nigeria, at unknown but probably soaring prices, are concentrating minds.
So is the realisation that clean coal technology - sulphur scrubbers plus the possible sequestration of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, in old North Sea oil wells - could double the price of electricity.
In short, the Government's energy policy is up the spout. And thanks to its regulation of the electricity market to squeeze prices, nobody is keen to build any sort of new power station. We are left with an impaired power supply industry that would struggle to keep the lights on in the cold winter being forecast by the Met Office.
Since it could take 10 years to build a nuclear power station, nuclear offers no immediate salvation either in terms of supply or CO2 reduction. In the longer term, it would provide security of supply at competitive prices, and it would be clean into the bargain.
The first step is to remove all the Government logs that are in danger of jamming the British economy. Is Blair the man to do it? Hmm...
Sir Bernard Ingham's paper on nuclear energy, "A failure to act inspired by political cowardice?", is published today by the Centre for Policy Studies
By Bernard Ingham
(Filed: 29/09/2005)
Is Tony Blair about to discover the courage that has eluded him for eight years? Is he, for a change, going to do the right thing for Britain? I ask because he has just given Greens the vapours by telling his party conference all options are open for tackling climate change, including building a new generation of nuclear power stations.
In fact, this does not take us much further forward. Blair, reputedly pro-nuclear, has led a government that for years has ruled the development of nuclear power neither in nor out.
The most we have been promised is a decision in this Parliament. Superficially, events are moving towards a conclusion. The Government is reviewing the various elements of its strategy, including renewable sources of energy, progress with reducing greenhouse gases - or lack of it, since volumes are up for the third year running - and the nuclear option.
It has appointed a Nuclear Decommissioning Agency to clean up old nuclear sites, though its strategy, now out for consultation, implies the end of nuclear power in Britain. And its much-derided Committee on Radioactive Waste Management promises us a report next July on the favoured method of disposing of longer-term radioactive wastes, though not where to put them.
So, we have to ask if Blair, in the second half of his final term, could overcome the policy paralysis that afflicts most democratic governments as an election looms and what such a decision might be worth when he is no longer there to carry it out.
Even though the Green Party polled little more than one per cent of the vote at the last election, Labour's energy policy has been dominated by obeisance to an environmentalism that irrationally regards nuclear as deadly poison. Indeed, it can hardly be said that we have an energy policy. The dominating consideration of the Energy Policy White Paper of 2003 was reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 60 per cent by 2050. Without consulting engineers, it chose the Green route to achieve this: a combination of renewable sources of energy - wind, waves, tides, solar, geothermal, biomass, chicken muck - energy conservation and natural gas.
Coal and nuclear, which still generate about half of our electricity, were to be allowed to disappear - "dirty" coal for environmental reasons and nuclear for dogmatic ones, unless it were proved there was no alternative.
There is some evidence that the realisation is dawning that we cannot do without nuclear power - and not just because it emits next to no greenhouse gases. Renewables, required to produce 10 per cent of our electricity by 2010, can now scarcely manage four per cent and most of that is large-scale hydro-electric. Intermittent wind, effectively the only substantial renewable generator, struggles to produce 0.5 per cent after 15 years' development at enormous expense, as the Commons' Public Accounts Committee has just revealed.
Energy conservation is getting nowhere. As Fells Associates have pointed out, it has been high on the agenda for 30 years and demand has risen by 60 per cent. Electricity demand rises at 1-1.5 per cent a year.
This leaves natural gas, which is now having to be imported, since North Sea production is falling. The strategic risks of importing 80-90 per cent of our energy from such politically unstable areas as Russia, the Middle East, Algeria and Nigeria, at unknown but probably soaring prices, are concentrating minds.
So is the realisation that clean coal technology - sulphur scrubbers plus the possible sequestration of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, in old North Sea oil wells - could double the price of electricity.
In short, the Government's energy policy is up the spout. And thanks to its regulation of the electricity market to squeeze prices, nobody is keen to build any sort of new power station. We are left with an impaired power supply industry that would struggle to keep the lights on in the cold winter being forecast by the Met Office.
Since it could take 10 years to build a nuclear power station, nuclear offers no immediate salvation either in terms of supply or CO2 reduction. In the longer term, it would provide security of supply at competitive prices, and it would be clean into the bargain.
The first step is to remove all the Government logs that are in danger of jamming the British economy. Is Blair the man to do it? Hmm...
Sir Bernard Ingham's paper on nuclear energy, "A failure to act inspired by political cowardice?", is published today by the Centre for Policy Studies
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