Meltdown Of A Meltdown

I don't really have the qualifications for a blogospheric book reviewer, what with the intermittentcy, the near-hostility to topicality and the extent to which my reading choices are dictated by whatever's in the 3 for 2 at Waterstone's at the time. But with hopefully two years of law textbooks ahead of me and little extra-curricular reading in prospect, I thought I ought to review my last pre-university book, not least because its contents are worth a look and unlikely to be seen.

It was while exploring the Oxfam bookshop in Cardiff with my good friend Justine Hall (who we'll have to forgive for being a Euro candidate for the Greens) that I ran across a copy of Meltdown: The Collapse of the Nuclear Dream. Besides being a book on nuclear politics and thus right in my wheelhouse, it had the added benefit of being written by Crispin Aubrey and bearing a puff quote from Paddy Ashdown.

Crispin's qualifications (for want of a better word) were fairly clear; an investigative journalist by trade, he moved to West Somerset just in time to become a staff member for Stop Hinkley Expansion, the campaign group that co-ordinated opposition at the public inquiry for the planning application for Hinkley Point C. As such, he was at the centre of what environmentalists tend to think of as their golden age, that stretch of time from Sizewell B through Rainbow Warrior via Newbury and Twyford Down to Manchester Airport where they could point to perceived accomplishments.

The subsequent loss of direct action has clearly hurt; the ongoing efforts to rewrite the criminal damage, trespass and assault laws by seeking justification through the courts to invade power plants are evidence enough of that. In that sense, environmentalists would really welcome some new nuclear power stations as an opportunity to revive the golden age, with the events described in Meltdown as the playbook.

Meltdown starts where all anti-nuclear tomes must, inside the exclusion zone at Chernobyl. For a book published in 1991, that's a pretty dumb place to start. During the Hinkley C inquiry ignorance of the facts of the Chernobyl accident was forgivable as the Soviet Union had done a pretty good job of covering them up. But by 1990 the facts had come out, not least in Zhores Medvedev's definitive The Legacy Of Chernobyl, which Crispin references without dealing with its contents which spell out in pretty stark detail just how irrelevant Chernobyl is to nuclear power in Britain.

Still, after such an inauspicious start Meltdown settles down with some useful history, both of the development of nuclear power in the UK and of the development of the protest movements against it. Equally, as that history passes you can see how the logic starts to go awry; there's an entertaining enough tale of some geologists doing preliminary investigations for a deep-level waste repository being chased out of Machynlleth by the local farmers, but the stated moral of the tale is that "it was clear that the scientists had been sent back to their drawing boards". We've been told for years that scientists don't know what to do with waste, but the tale that's told here is of protests leading to a political decision and the politics don't invalidate the science; indeed, thirty years later after Tom King (ironically, the MP for Hinkley Point) decided to abandon work on the repository, Finland are already building theirs and it remains Britain's intent to have one.

It's a tale we've seen only recently with Kingsnorth. I'm no fan of the place by any means, but while the Climate Hi-De-Hiers proclaim victory, I have to ask myself which is more credible; that E-On caved in the face of a bunch of criminals (which, let's be clear, is what they are) or that the project has become somewhat less attractive because of that minor thing we call the credit crunch. Somehow, I get the feeling it's the economy, stupid...

Soon we reach the main event, the public inquiry itself. The account is, unsurprisingly, one of a gallant battle against faceless bureaucrats to allow the voice of the people to be heard. On its own that's fair enough, but underpinning it is the idea that the emotional response of the public should have, not just weight, but decisive weight, in the planning process. Now I'll be the first to say that planning law is too restrictively drawn and that at the local authority level there should be additional grounds that can be considered. But one thing the planning system is very clear on is that the decision should be rational and based on the facts; supplanting that sort of system with mob rule is self-evidently nonsense.

The role of local authorities in marshaling that public opinion is also intriguing. One of the key turning points at Hinkley comes in 1985 when the Liberal Democrats take control of Somerset County Council, without which change the public inquiry might not have happened at all. A motley alliance of local authorities from around the Bristol Channel eventually forms, though this is founded on a base of opposition in South Wales which is rather more pro-coal than it is anti-nuclear.

But the most surprising revelation in that direction is that by 1988, even Anglesey District Council (as was) was prepared to state its opposition to new nuclear power; this on an island where Wylfa Power Station was the biggest employer and Anglesey Aluminium (powered by Wylfa) was second. Crispin sees this as a great moral victory; I'd hazard that it's just possible that a council long dominated by independents unable to form a single cohesive strategic thought was more than able to recognise a populist bandwagon when it rolled into town. In any case, strategically challenged as they were (and indeed remain), at the peak of the boomiest boom for decades it's possible that they may have taken their eye off the economic crystal ball for a moment, something I'm sure the hundreds now being made redundant at Anglesey Aluminium thanks to Wylfa never having been replaced are particularly grateful for.

Either way, by the end of the inquiry and much as they did at Sizewell B, the campaigners conclude that they have won. It's that conviction that the environmentalists are clinging to even now; the idea that even if the government gets its way and someone does try, they can defeat it at the public inquiry.

There are three tiny flaws in this theory. In the first instance, the victory has now been rendered rather pyrrhic. After the year-long Hinkley inquiry and the three-year long Sizewell inquiry with its 340 days of public session, governments came to recognise that actually, a similarly lengthy inquiry on an application by a private company would probably end up mired in both judicial review and misfeasance suits. The Labour government's response, the Infrastructure Planning Commission, is undoubtedly horribly quangocratic but at the same time, if you set out to abuse the public inquiry process you shouldn't be shocked if you have it taken away from you.

Even if you got a public inquiry, the original victory is in any case irrelevant. Because Hinkley C was to be built by the CEGB, a nationalised industry, the public inquiry was allowed to consider, and indeed obsessed over considering, the relative economic merits of it being a nuclear power station. The campaigners sense of victory came largely because the inquiry came right in the middle of the privatisation process which was appallingly botched; it was a late-Thatcher privatisation, that it was appallingly botched was a given. When, however, Electricite de France come along with their new application and the man from Greenpeace asks them about the economics, EdF will tell him or her that it's a commercial matter for EdF and would he mind awfully effing off, preferably at some speed.

Beyond the pyrrhicism and irrelevancy, however, it's most important to note that the victory also never happened. Ultimately, the CEGB's application was approved and the station only failed to be built because the eventual successor companies (the nationalised Nuclear Electric and the privatised British Energy) were never equipped with the resources to do it, again thanks to Maggie's munificence. Should they continue to rely on something that didn't happen twenty years ago and couldn't happen now, I fear the greens might be a mite disappointed.

As for the epilogue, the peer into the future of nuclear, I can't really blame Crispin, writing in 1991, for underestimating just how crucial climate change would become at a time when it was still just the greenhouse effect. His effort to sketch out a low-carbon Britain is still pretty admirable, even if some of the things that have been done (low-energy lightbulbs) haven't stopped the upward trend and some of the things that should have been done (the Severn Barrage) haven't. I'll even allow the primacy given to energy efficiency in general (though I will once again point you to the Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate, the Jevons Paradox and the rock I'm throwing at your head) and the lack of understanding of operating margin in the grid.

At the end, however, you're left with the feeling that despite having lived with the gorillas in the mist, Crispin hasn't understood them. For even his plan foresees significant investment in gas (which we've done, though only so Maggie could be mean to the miners) and clean coal, the very thing the environmentalists are now breaking the law to try and stop. With those elements, it's merely quite far-fetched; without them it's both a pretty good statement of Green policy twenty years on and completely off its tree.

I suppose I should conclude happy in the knowledge that those I oppose live in carefree delusion to what's about to hit them. Until my own party stops living that way, however...

Set Course, Smug Factor Five

I don't get to gloat with this blog very often, so I'm not going to pass up the opportunity when it's handed to me on a plate. Regular readers (by which I mean Sid and Doris) may remember this piece from September, highlighting a study that assessed the performance of a future large-scale wind farm programme using Met Office wind speed data.

The primary finding of said study was that the peak winter electricity demand normally coincides with a cold snap caused by a stalled high-pressure system which, being a high-pressure system, produces very little wind.

A bit like the one we're having now, in fact.

I believe that great philosopher of our times, Ace Ventura, put it best when he said, "Can you feel that buddy, huh? Huh? Huh?"

Failure To Dylan

Joe Otten's useful heads-up on Caroline Lucas and the dogma of the Church of EnvironMentalism reminds me of something I meant to blog about a while back but left alone largely to avoid overloading the world with energy stuff.

We are often reminded how windy Britain is and how much potential there is meant to be for wind generation. Heck, one Lib Dem blogger (who I will refrain from naming in order to save a fellow elected member from having their name and moron too closely associated in Google) even went so far as to say;

“It's a myth that renewables cannot provide baseload. There has never been a day on record when the wind has not blown somewhere in the UK. The point about baseload is that what you need is enough people in enough places producing electricity. The more you decentralise electricity generation the more secure the baseload becomes. “

Interestingly, two weeks before that was said, a useful little study of the actual potential of wind generation in Britain was published. Okay, most of you probably weren't reading The Telegraph when it was covered, but I would hope my constant plugs have started to focus everyone's minds on The Register, a far more sound source of technology news.

As our anonymous blogger rightly identifies, the great problem for wind has always been the difficult question of variability; that sooner or later, the wind will stop blowing. We as Lib Dems have never really worried about this because the answer, we're told, is our favourite word; decentralisation. Indeed, some have proposed that large scale wind investment should be accompanied by the establishment of a Europe-wide electricity grid, so that the areas with the best wind at any moment can sort everyone else out.

The study uses the existing Met Office wind speed database, as measured at weather stations across the country, to evaluate the nationwide wind potential over the decade from 1996 to 2005. In general terms, it finds the system susceptible to “large, rapid and frequent changes of power output.” Hardly the best of starts, but nothing like as bad as things get when we consider the extremes of Britain's energy needs.

Excluding specific events like deaths on Coronation Street and England reaching the semi-final of anything, the annual peak of electricity demand generally occurs on the coldest evening of the winter between five and six pm, as domestic demand rises after the school run faster than commercial demand tails off at close of business.

You might expect that the coldest events are associated with Arctic or Siberian winds blowing cold air into the country. What the report finds, however, is that the coldest period in any British winter occurs when a high pressure system takes up residency over the country for a period of days; the absence of cloud to insulate the nation being far more potent when it lasts for five days or more.

More importantly, however, high pressure systems not only bring no cloud, but no wind either. Perhaps the most shocking finding of the report is this; between five and six pm on February 2^nd, 2006 (the peak of the electricity demand that year) the total electricity output of the UK's wind turbines was less than zero, as demand from auxiliary systems in the turbines exceeded their output. And that isn't a number from the model; it's the actual result as measured by the National Grid! What's more, such examples really aren't unusual; a five day high pressure, low wind cold snap is an annual occurrence in the UK, while a ten day low wind cold snap is probably a once in twenty year event.

As for the Europe-wide grid, the report compared their modelled wind load factor for the UK against the large existing wind farm system in Germany and Denmark;

I'm sure you don't need my help reading that graph.

The message remains as clear as it has always been; the question of our future energy supply is absolutely not intuitive and it cannot be answered by reference to bland and uninformed generalisations. There is no issue for which that old chestnut the “informed debate” is more vital.

Clegg Whispers Those Three Little Words

It may surprise regular readers to know that I actually quite enjoy it when the party launches another new energy policy. Not because they're good; I know full well they will be moronic, technologically illiterate and suffused with the very worst in pseudo-religious Church of EnvironMentalism dogma. Nevertheless, there is great humour value in our pontifications; rarely is so imbecilic a policy promulgated with such high-handed earnestness and faith in the one true way of viridism.

So I was fully prepared to leave today's press stunt well alone and was fully willing to give it nothing more than a cursory glance amidst the triple jump final at the Bird's Nest. But then my cursory glance alighted on three little words that were missing from the press coverage. Because despite the spin, the paper absolutely does not say that we want to make Britain energy independent by 2050. Instead, it adds a vital and, frankly, offensive caveat, because what it actually says is;

Britain needs to set itself an ambitious goal - to become energy independent within the EU by 2050.

Let's leave aside for a moment that by using “independent within the EU” we're cribbing lines off Plaid Cymru and ask ourselves one simple question.

Why on Earth would you need to apply that specific caveat?

I mean, I'm all for reducing our dependency on dictatorships like Russia and Saudi Arabia, but is it really necessary to define the world of stable democracies as being those countries that pledge fealty to Brussels? Haven't you just told the USA, Canada, Australia, Japan and the rest exactly where they can shove it? Isn't such an attitude nothing short of despicable from the party that more than any other shouts its internationalist credentials to the rooftops?

What's worse, there's actually a lot to like in this policy. Neither Labour nor Tory has yet grasped that delivering even the renewables targest we have now will actually at some point require HMG to actively do something instead of going around telling everyone how nice it would be if somebody else did something, so to see us getting on board is very welcome.

But then it's all let down by the headline and the three little words. The real tragedy of it all is that, without the caveat, we could have put forward the first realistic energy independence policy of any British political party. For while the renewable dream we've put forward today is the worst kind of technologically illiterate bullshit, with Canada and Australia in the mix we could push on with a truly revolutionary nuclear-renewable mix that really would end our dependence on the Putins of this world.

The headline isn't wrong; we really do need the sort of technological revolution that mankind has so far only managed to fuel through the worst of wartime hatred. I fear however that it is not so much an Apollo that we need, but a Manhattan.

How Biofuelled Is My Valley?

Speaking of policies that fit our world-view but not necessarily the facts, the dramatic turnaround in the status of biofuel has been a welcome fillip to those of us who care more about pesky little things like facts; we'd expected it to take a lot longer for everyone else to notice. Nevertheless, the real lesson of the whole saga still hasn't quite hit home as it should.

Ultimately, the reason we liked biofuels is the reason we like householder recycling, is the reason we like energy-saving light bulbs. It's all a question of the total sum of individuals making little contributions; biofuels were meant to help in this respect because it's much easier to change from diesel to biofuel than it is to change your car. As Liberal Democrats, we've embraced the idea wholesale and with good reason; for all their talk about neoliberalism, the parishioners of the Church of Environmentalism have failed to notice that this part of their own ideology is the most authentically liberal of the lot.

The key word in that paragraph, however, is car. If changing individual behaviour is your goal, the car is obviously the key target in the transport arena. We've had experiments in other modes, but they've met with a mixture of indifference and antipathy. The biofuel train got the Prime Minister's bum on a seat, but once it reached Llandudno everyone stopped caring. Meanwhile, the biofuel plane was met with positive hostility, but that was more a reflection of a visceral hatred of air travel and Richard Branson than any problem with the energy medium.

Before we write the obituary of biofuels, then, we should at least consider how valid that focus on cars was. Moreover, as much as we need to consider the Kyoto enforcement period (six months down, fifty-four to go), we should also think about the long-term scenario, the eventual low-carbon society we will need to meet the next set of targets and the set after that and the set after that. In the long-term, the criterion to apply is relatively simple. All we are looking for is the technology that delivers, for any particular purpose, the necessary quantity of energy at the right rate for the right period with the lowest emissions.

For the car, you're talking about a technology that can make a one tonne vehicle go from 0-60mph in about ten seconds, maintaining 60mph for about 400 miles with an engine and fuel tank of similar size to those in existing units. For that sort of performance, battery/solar electric systems, fuel cell systems and hydrogen systems are all likely to get there in the next decade or so; on that basis, biofuel is a pretty poor contender.

With the train, the answer is even more obvious because it already exists. Heck, between their massive use of nuclear and the level of electrification of their network, France are already operating an effective model for the sort of zero-carbon system we could introduce in quite short order. Even without a move to nuclear, increased electrification in Britain would mean an effective fuel switch from oil to gas, with at least some reduction in emissions.

(It's worth noting at this point that Labour are perilously close to matching their Conservative predecessors by capping their decline with a disastrous railway-related decision. The crimes of the foot and mouth cull and Iraq and the wastage of the NHS IT programme will be as nothing to the insanity of the current Intercity Express Programme if it does indeed produce a new diesel High Speed Train instead of the wholesale electrification of the remaining inter-city lines we so desperately need.)

And so we come to air travel, where we face a fundamentally different challenge. Jet propulsion absolutely requires a combustible medium, nothing else will do. Moreover, whereas an electric motor for 60mph is a relatively easy proposition, a lightweight pure propeller engine for 60,000lbs of thrust is not. Barring that sort of technological leap, your options are basically hydrogen and biofuel, and even then you have to figure that unless metal hydride storage takes off, hydrogen for air travel pretty much ended with the Hindenburg...

As it turns out, not only are the Envionmentalists wrong that biofuel shouldn't be considered for air travel, but air travel is the only area where pursuing biofuels is essential. I'd be surprised that the truth is the exact opposite of the dogma, but that point has long since passed...

How The Silly Season Works, Apparently…

Loathe as I am to “work” on a bank holiday, I feel duty bound to respond to today’s Western Mail advert against nuclear power, as noted by Peter Black. I’m required to call it that, because on closer reading we discover that this “news story” is actually just a press release from the Welsh Anti-Nuclear Alliance that the Mail has printed essentially verbatim because it’s that time of year. Nevertheless, I have to give credit to WANA for filling the gap in the silly season market and for providing such a thorough example of where the anti-nuclear argument is at the moment.

The first strand of attack is the economic one, but as ever, nothing so gauche as an actual cost analysis is included. Now I can understand why this is the case; I mean, if you were advocating massive increases in wind power, you wouldn’t want to admit that actually, the infrastructure costs of connecting the whole Isle of Lewis to the National Grid are so massive that they make your final costs look hideous. Mentioning the actual numbers takes away from the gospel assertion that wind is cheap and nuclear isn’t, so we don’t do that.

Instead, a variety of water-muddying titbits are thrown in, in the hope that they will reaffirm popular misconceptions. So here we open with nuclear requiring higher proportional capital investment than fossil fuels; this is true, but only because nuclear uses so little fuel that its proportional costs are weighted to the fixed end. WANA want you to assume that, because the fixed costs are proportionally high, no company will be willing to make the investment, but they offer no sort of figures to prove that it is so.

As a sub-plot to that, the British Energy bail-out is brought up again. While it may be nice for the campaigners to think that this is certified proof of uneconomic performance by nuclear specifically, a look at the history is instructive. Essentially, when British Energy was privatised, the government should have made a cash contribution to the new company to reflect the liabilities incurred up to that point. This did not sit with the ideologues concept of privatisation leading to money flowing into the treasury, so the eventual contribution was insufficient. When the British wholesale electricity market collapsed in 2002, BE ended up being worst hit purely because they’d been short-changed on the asset/liability ratio ten years earlier, as a result of which the government was required to step in to make good on its earlier failure. WANA may wish to blame “the nuclear industry” for being big and bad, but in reality they should blame the Major government for being grossly incompetent (so no change there then…)

The second strand is the process story. Now that the government has announced its ideas for “streamlining” the planning process, everyone wants to make out that the intent is to screw the public over. Far be it from me to defend the government, but the “streamlining” is largely a response to the Sizewell B experience, wherein the local planning inquiry was turned into CEGB vs. Greenpeace, FoE et al. and the whole nuclear industry was put on trial for ten years. The local planning inquiry should be about local issues, about whether site x is suitable for thing y; national strategy should be decided elsewhere and hopefully the new processes will deliver that.

By contrast, WANA make the bizarre claim that construction over-runs in the AGR programme were caused by the lack of public inquiry, a classic case of post hoc, ergo propter hoc. To add to the weirdness, in this case WANA do offer a number, claiming that the average over-run in the AGR programme was ten years. Given that I know full-well that the longest over-run was at Dungeness B, and that over-run, on one of the two reactors, was sixteen years, I am at a loss to see how they can compute that the average over-run across a fourteen reactor programme was as high as ten years.

Another angle the process story allows is the idea that new reactor designs are dangerously experimental and will not be properly scrutinised. For that argument, I’ll merely offer you links to the official sites of the AP1000, EPR and ESBWR (for details of the evolutionary nature of these designs) and note that reactors such as these are under construction in Finland and China and have received design certification in the USA. The man at WANA may think what he wants, but nations around the world are queuing up to disagree with him.

And then, to add to the joy, right at the end WANA dip into an argument that I’m sure will develop over the next few years. I have always said that the greatest test of a new nuclear programme will come when the Daily Mail discover that the first new plant is being built by Electricité de France, and it’s nice to see WANA subconsciously adding fuel to the future xenophobia argument by mentioning the nationalities of the companies involved.

I have said before and will undoubtedly say again, our future energy policy must be holistic; leaving the debate to self-appointed experts and conducting it in a culture of unremitting hostility to anything said by the companies involved is no way to deal with the vast range of economic, environmental and security issues we face.