The Speeches What I Wrote

When you blog as infrequently as I do, it's important to ensure that anything you write gets put down for digital posterity. To that end, here are the two speeches I gave at Welsh Conference last weekend in Wrexham (of which more anon...) First, in the transport consultation debate;

Never has a government rested quite so luxuriously on its laurels than the Labour/Plaid coalition has on transport. In the early days of devolution there were real achievements; the Vale of Glamorgan Line, the Ebbw Vale Line, concessionary fares...

But while our new Minister has delivered quite nicely for his own vanity (it's called Ieuan Air for a reason) the projects that matter have stagnated and even the misguided projects they were pursuing, they can't afford. Heck, they can't even manage to get Cardiff's Eastern Bay Link Road, the main road between the Assembly and the M4, going and if you can't rely on the naked self-interest of politicians, what can you rely on?

Meanwhile, they just peddle the same old line as Westminster; longer platforms, longer trains. But while those are undoubtedly necessary, if Dr. Beeching taught us anything its that the railways must go directly to people in their own communities. Thanks to our since-abandoned industrial heritage, the scope for expansion in Wales is enormous; the Swansea District Line, the Aberystwyth-Carmarthen Line, the Fairwater-Creigiau Line and ten new stations in Cardiff, plus Carno, Rossett, Caerleon and all the rest.

Particularly in the downturn, we need a step change in our ambition for the railways. To deliver that, we need a step change in the way we operate, from franchises to regional transport consortia and I'm particularly glad the consultation document recognises that.

We talk so often about the things devolution can't do. Transport is something it can do. Labour and Plaid should be ashamed at how little they've done with it and we are perfectly placed to show them what they could have won. Heck, at least that speedboat might have been more use than Ieuan Wyn Jones has...

And then on tidal power;

I should really start by declaring something of an interest; once upon a time I worked for an electricity generating company and I have a Masters degree in Nuclear Reactor Technology. I think it's safe to day, therefore, that if anyone was going to stand up here and push for the biggest, shiniest engineering boondoggle imaginable, it would be me.

I'll admit too that I was rather worried about this report before it came out, because if there's a wishy-washy, half-arsed, wouldn't hurt a fly energy policy out there then by gum we'll try it!

I'm happy to say, however, that this report is nothing of the sort. It's a recognition that if we want to replace the fifty billion kilowatt-hours of electricity we use that is produced from carbon-emitting sources, we must take advantage of the unique tidal resource we have in the Severn Estuary.

Equally, however, it recognises that there is so much more that you can do than has been proposed so far. The existing barrage proposal has been around for so long it has become synonymous; Lavernock Point-Brean Down is the barrage, the barrage is Lavernock Point-Brean Down. But as the report shows, the Lavernock Point-Brean Down barrage is too slow and not the best way to maximise the power output of the estuary.

The thing I think you should bear particularly in mind, however, is the additional infrastructure these proposals would allow. A rail link from Penarth to Weston would be slow, difficult to build and do little to boost usage. The Shoots barrage, on the other hand, is a perfect replacement for the 125-year-old Severn Tunnel. The Aberthaw-Minehead tidal reef would be a significant shortcut between South Wales and the South West, get the West Somerset Line reopened and potentially provide flood defences for the whole of Somerset.

In conclusion, this is a comprehensive, ambitious policy and I urge you to support it.

And in both cases, they did.

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...

Macrohyperation

So, before I was so rudely interrupted by Tom Brake's legislatory indiscretion, I was writing about some energy news the blogosphere has missed. A more cynical mind would suggest that that omission was a tad convenient...

Microgeneration is one of those policies that ticks all the liberal boxes. The mere idea of millions of individual households all selling electricity they generated themselves undoubtedly generates warm fuzzy feelings in many of our number. It certainly generates warm fuzzy feelings in policy working group members, warranting its own subsection of last year's Zero Carbon Britain policy paper.

You might expect, therefore, the blogosphere to herald the publication of a report commissioned by a consortium including DBERR, various Regional Development Agencies, a couple of NGOs and the odd utility company that, if media reports are to be believed, promises a bright future for the various technologies concerned. Then again, it's entirely possible that the bloggers, unlike the journalists but like the good folks at The Register, actually read the report...

The headline figure is, it is true, quite good; a possible 30 MtCO₂ reduction in emissions by 2030, which would represent a 5% cut on present UK total emissions. From the end of the first paragraph of the headline summary, however, things start to go downhill.

The immediate barrier to adoption of microgeneration is entirely financial. Not only do the existing technologies have significant up-front costs, but consumers continue to attach a higher importance to those up-front costs than to any subsequent long-term savings. In countries where microgeneration has proliferated, it has done so through massive subsidy, both in terms of funding for installation and guaranteed prices for excess generation sold to the market (the “feed-in tariff” of myth and legend...)

Moreover, when we talk about wide scale uptake of microgeneration, we should not con ourselves that we are looking forward to a world of wind turbines on every roof. The reality is that the truly attractive technology is combined heat and power; right now, micro combined heat and power is attractive at a subsidy of 5p/kWh, while micro renewables are only attractive at 40p/kWh.

And as the split there suggests, combined heat and power may well be microgeneration, but it is fossil fuel microgeneration, so the carbon benefits are non-existent. To hit that 30MtCO₂ target, therefore, fuel cell combined heat and power technology is needed. It may well come about, but any assessment of time scales is of necessity an estimate whose optimism must be accounted for.

All in all, the optimistic scenario from paragraph one (and, indeed, from the headlines in The Grauniad and elsewhere) delivers 110 TWh of heat and 30TWh of electricity, of which 16 TWh of heat and 4 TWh of electricity are renewable. The cost?

£21 billion. By 2020. And £5.5 billion per year thereafter.

Of course, the press coverage downplays both the fossil fuelled element and the cost, while making the normal lazy comparison with, in this case, “five nuclear power stations.” Unfortunately, that number is utter bollocks, appearing nowhere in the report. In reality, the zero-carbon element of the microgeneration proposed is worth half a Sizewell B a year (two if you consider total energy and not just electrical). Furthermore, a new Sizewell B costs at most £3 billion, so for the same subsidy needed to give microgeneration a shot you could get twice as much electricity and three times as much zero-carbon energy from new nuclear build.

The numbers go on and on, but I fear there's little point. As I said at the start, we like microgeneration not because it is green, but because it is the opposite of the monolithic, centralised system that nuclear in particular represents. We should remember, however, that our creed is not devolution per se; it is devolution to the lowest level practicable. Microgeneration may entice us, but if it cannot deliver the level of milk and honey we seek, we must discard it.

No End In Site

Very few things on this blog can be considered regular. One of the few consistent elements is my award for Stupidest Political Quote Of The Year, a prize which normally does a good job of being won before the summer recess. But even that isn't especially successful, particularly as it's not the snappiest title in the world and the acronym, SPQOTY, isn't much cop either.

So I've been wondering about a suitable name for it. Eponymisation is clearly a non-starter as the going rate for something like that is one charitable foundation and a councillor's allowance doesn't quite stretch to that. First winners are normally a fairly safe bet, except in this case it was Ed Balls and that might make the inevitable future trophy somewhat difficult (or at the very least family-unfriendly). And then there's the easy way out, which is to call it the Scunner Broon Award and have done with it; after all, he's said enough stupid things this year to win it ten times over.

That however has its own problems. For starters, there's the question of whether the rules should allow for the SPQOTY for 2008 to be something said in 2007. I mean, for all that;

“We could have fought an election on the issue of competence”

Was flaming daft last October, it's positively ten feet over Neptune now; rarely has a political epitaph been so comprehensively and rapidly produced.

More importantly, however, I have to ask myself whether it actually meets the criteria for the award; insanely stupid though it was, the present Government's competence (or more accurately their utter lack thereof) is no laughing matter for millions of people.

For all the calamity, however, I've rarely believed for a second that any of it might lead to the Supreme Leader's departure from Downing Street. As they proved with the Blair debacle, the Labour Party just isn't psychologically cut out for the idea that a member of the Party could perform badly enough to overcome the bonds of collective loyalty; heck, in a party so deluded that some members of its student wing believe that Alan Johnson (yes, the same Alan Johnson who pushed through top-up fees) is the saviour of the Party's left-wing ideals, anything is possible.

I mention all this because, despite all this, I'm starting to wonder whether Gordon can actually beat the odds and get himself kicked out. Discounting all the standard extreme possibilities (generally the ones that feature animals and/or bondage equipment), there are things he could do that even a Labour backbencher's self-interest would struggle to avoid.

The largest category of these is probably the “Don't Vote For Us If...”s. Perhaps understandably, elected politicians can throw away thousands of votes without worrying each other, so long as those votes are statistical; it's only when the discarded votes are directly identifiable that things go wrong.

Which is why I was surprised that Gordon chose this juncture to announce that he favours the use of new sites for the construction of nuclear power stations. The government's new-found commitment to new nuclear build has as yet posed little threat to anything, largely because no-one in Whitehall seems to have grasped that in order for it to happen they have to reach beyond the warm words and actually, you know... do something about it. But at least until now the “threat” has been to existing power station sites, where local opposition will be limited thanks to community experience of the existing facilities.

Don't get me wrong, I agree with the policy; if we want to move from looking for a low-carbon economy to a zero-carbon economy, we will need more nuclear than we have at the moment and that will mean exploring new sites. Nevertheless, as a piece of politics it's a calamitous announcement; without any qualification as to specific sites that are or aren't being considered... well, put simply, “Nowhere Is Safe From Gordon's Nuclear Nightmare”.

Is Brown's departure likely? Not especially. But if he continues to show a propensity to employ shovels while already well below ground level, particularly when the material being removed is great clumps of voters, he may have one last shot at being a history-making Prime Minister, if not necessarily in the way he might desire...

Now That's What I Call A Non-Event

Certain sections of the press and the blogosphere seem to be under the impression that John Hutton today stood up in Parliament and announced a new generation of nuclear power stations. To borrow the phrase of that great philosopher Wayne Campbell, “shuh, as if…”

For starters, the statement is utterly meaningless because Greenpeace are going to seek judicial review over the consultation process again and they’re going to win again because the whole business is clearly living in New Labour La La Land and until ministers take their balls out and stop their pathetic attempts to spin the decision nothing is going to happen.

More fundamentally, however, the Government still hasn’t grasped the fact that if it wants new nuclear power stations it actually has to do something. And no, before all the acolytes of the Book Of Brower rain down on me, it has nothing to do with money (and while we’re at it, if people continue to flagrantly misuse the word subsidy in the context of this debate, I’m going to start cracking heads!)

To take the BBC’s list of the things in the announcement;

• Speed up planning process to make it easier to build plants – Necessary, yes, but you have rather announced it before (when you published the draft Planning Bill, for example…)
• No public subsidies for nuclear except in emergencies – Yes, that has been the case for a number of years and recognizes our existing treaty obligations, but I don’t think a Minister of the Crown should get special credit for knowing what the status quo is
• No limit to amount of electricity generated by nuclear power – What, because there was any chance of you saying “no, you can’t build that one, we’ve already got enough” before?
• New independent body to monitor decommissioning costs – Erm, wouldn’t that be the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, which you kind of announced when it was in the Energy Act 2004 and has been operating for two years?
• Trebling of investment in wind and wave power – Yes, but I’m going to take a guess that that’s a trebling from about 50p and so not the windfall it sounds like
• Store nuclear waste at 'interim' facility until suitable underground site found – Again, nice to see you’ve spotted what we’re doing already, but if John Prescott wasn’t as incompetent as, well, John Prescott, it wouldn’t be an issue by now…

Meanwhile, none of this addresses the fundamental block on investment in any form of new generating capacity, namely the “BETTA” electricity market system that was designed, essentially by Enron, to benefit gas-fired station owners like, ooh, Enron, to the detriment of both wind and nuclear. Despite the bluster we’re likely to hear over the next few days from the Church of EnvironMentalism, nuclear does not need and is not looking for brown envelopes of used twenties; what it does need is for the government to really grasp the nettle and put in place an electricity market that recognises that our goal must be low carbon generation, not high brokers fees generation.

Thank YouTube It's Friday

YouTube has finally come up with the goods and I can present my favourite video of all time (four versions thereof, no less!)

If the Public Information Film man didn't do it for you, surely Tomorrow's World's very own Maggie Philbin is authoritative enough?

And in the interests of balance, here are the news reports of the day's events, proof positive that some things never change...

The Limits Of Sadness?

I promised myself that, having missed the live coverage of today's business by the remarkable feat of having something better to do, I wouldn't watch the repeats because that might constitute overdoing it. My resistance became even more fierce when I found that I was turning on to the nuclear power section of the environmental debate, which one might imagine would lead me into realms of unimaginable fury. And yet, here I am, still watching (at least until University Challenge comes and rescues me at 8!)

For fear of getting personal, I must start by saying that Deborah Newton-Cook is an idiot. I'm left with little other option after her delightfully ignorant statement that Chernobyl could happen in Britain. As someone whose undergraduate dissertation was on that very subject, I can assure her that the Chernobyl accident could only occur in that specific design of reactor and that design was only ever built in the former Soviet Union.

On the other hand, I fear that I'm starting to want to have Chris Davies' babies. This is a strange idea in two ways, namely that I'm one of the straight ones in the party and that I've actually met Chris Davies' children. But his speech was exactly the right note; our numbers have never added up, we have always believed the wildest claims of the developers of new technology (who are actually evil capitalists themselves, even if their products are nice and fluffy) and we have never considered electricity generation holistically.

At least the science wasn't totally absent; I'm delighted to see there were some interventions questioning the overall logic of biofuels, it would have been really depressing if we had taken that piece of the creed without thinking about the whole package too...

In other news, nice to see that the journalists have found LDYS in some respect (LDYS England Convenor Rachel Hamburger having just appeared with James Landale on News 24). This should of course prompt another reminder for all of you who are there to go to the LDYS stall and get conference's must-have item!

Anyhow, I'm signing off as it's approaching 8 and Exeter vs. Jesus, Cambridge is a far superior attraction!

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.

The Nuclear Option

Blogging on energy policy is a tricky business for me; I have to declare in the register of interests that I’m currently finishing an MSc in Nuclear Reactor Technology and have worked previously for both British Nuclear Group and National Nuclear Corporation. In any case, if I were to post an extended pro-nuclear polemic, the grief received would not be worth it.

Instead, I thought I’d offer a few of my favourite insights into the underlying science. Because if anything strikes me about coverage of energy matters, it’s that no-one in the political or journalistic spheres really understands how energy production works. So, in no particular order;

• Installed capacity is not the same as available capacity. Actually, I can’t stress this one enough; Installed capacity is not the same as available capacity! The easiest argument in the world is “nuclear makes up 20% of our electricity generation, we have 20% overcapacity, so if we close the nuclear stations it’ll be fine”. Installed capacity represents the maximum generation potential of a power station, but a reserve is required to allow for planned shutdowns, faults, climate factors… 20% overcapacity is probably okay, though 25% would be preferable.
• Foreign interconnectors do not count as installed capacity either. In recent years we have boosted our capacity to take electricity from grids in continental Europe, but this should not be considered as if it were just another power station. Italy had major power cuts in 2003 because they did just that, then found that a heatwave left both Italy and France with low reserves. At that point, the French told the Italians just exactly where they could shove their interconnectors and shut them off. Even if we had a European electricity market (and we’re so far away from it it’s laughable), no politician in their right mind is going to risk power cuts in their own country by helping out another country.
• Again, one I really can’t stress enough; It’s not that “we” don’t know what to do with nuclear waste, it’s that “you” don’t. Technically, long-term storage of nuclear waste is a solved problem, the argument is merely political. And if you doubt it, here’s the measure. Assume we do what we currently propose, namely vitrify, pack in grouted steel canisters, bury in a concrete-lined chamber 500m underground, then concrete up the chamber itself. Then assume that on the day the chamber is sealed, all civilisation on Earth is brought to an end by an earthquake of unprecedented global, let alone British, magnitude. Then assume that this earthquake breaks the chamber and all the canisters and exposes them all to the water table. Then assume that a person establishes a farmstead on the 1km square around the point where the flow from the chamber hits the surface. Then assume that that person never leaves the farm and only eats things grown in that 1km square area. Then consider that that person’s chance of contracting cancer from radiation is increased by the same amount as that of a person who moves house from London to Truro…
• The largest source of uncertainty in the economic case for power stations has nothing to do with the stations themselves, it is a function of the way the government has decided to structure the market. Under BETTA (British Electricity Trading and Transmission Arrangements), generators must sell half-hour tranches of capacity onto what is essentially a commodities trading market. Now, dairy farmers get screwed by supermarkets because they cannot control the timing of the milk supply and they must sell it during its shelf life; electricity has an even shorter shelf life, so the transmission and supply companies can screw them in exactly the same way. The tranche system also screws renewable generators, who cannot with 100% accuracy predict how much capacity they will have in any half-hour period, leaving them often having to buy make-up capacity at inflated prices.
• Despite what I’ve seen some bloggers try to argue, nuclear does help security of supply and lessen dependence on foreign resources. In the first instance, the majority of the world’s oil comes from the Middle East while the bulk of the world’s uranium comes from Australia and Canada. In the second, a 1000MW coal-fired power station requires between 3 and 9 million tonnes of a coal a year, depending on quality; a similarly sized nuclear plant requires 27 tonnes of fuel a year. This just in; stockpiling of uranium is practical, stockpiling of fossil fuels really isn’t…
• On the matter of security, how feasible is it that terrorists will intercept a nuclear fuel transport and extract the plutonium from it? Well, even if we assume that they can evade all the spy satellites ever built with sufficient forces to overwhelm a fully armed transport vessel in the middle of the ocean, break open the thick steel transport cans and remove the fuel, consider that in order to remove plutonium from uranium, Britain has constructed a factory bigger than most cathedrals. Are we really to believe that while it costs us £2 billion, they could do it with the chemistry kit they got at Toys ‘R’ Us?
• Hydrogen is not the great saviour of all renewable energy sources. Hydrogen production by solar energy and biomass may well prove possible, but for wind, wave and tidal power the only feasible production process is electrolysis. Unfortunately, electrolysis of water for hydrogen requires temperatures approaching 1000°C as well as electricity, and wind, wave and tidal are never going to get there. In reality, hydrogen production is best suited to systems that produce consistent high temperatures, allowing the thermal output to be used directly for electricity generation during high demand or for hydrogen production during low demand. Gee, I wonder if we have anything like that at present…
• Energy efficiency is not the great saviour of anything. If nothing else, we must remember that energy savings themselves are not 100% efficient; if new technology makes something use 10% less energy, the cost of doing that thing reduces and hence people do it more (the Khazoom-Brookes hypothesis). You cannot escape it by restricting what you make more energy efficient; if you make an industrial process more energy efficient, the product of that process becomes cheaper so more people buy it so production increases so more energy is used. In an economic world, energy use is always going to be a function of energy cost.
• Uranium is only a scarce resource if you ignore just about everything. Current estimates of available resources assume something like 3% utilisation of fissile uranium; with reprocessing, utilisation in the high 90’s is possible. As the cost of uranium mining increases with scarcity, reprocessing becomes economical and your reserve lifetime goes up thirty times (from around 50 years to around 1500). Then factor in breeder reactors that convert uranium from its inert to its fissile form, increasing overall utilisation from 0.7% to the high 90’s again, giving another factor of around 125, increasing the lifetime estimate to 187,000 years. Then factor in thorium (four times more abundant than uranium, can be converted to fissile uranium with existing reactors, hence your resources go up from 187,500 years to 937,500 years). Would anyone like to argue that that constitutes scarce?
• There’s nothing worse in this debate than the ton of arguments that blindly ignore the rest of existence. Ed Davey recently said that no nuclear power plant in Europe had ever been built on time and on budget; would he like to identify for me please the vast swathe of buildings of all types across the continent that have?

My overarching point is this; the 21^st century will be the energy century. The decisions we make now, about energy for industry, energy for domestics, energy for transportation, will dictate our position on climate change, on geopolitics, on commerce, on industry… Whatever we do, we must make the decision on the facts; at a time when we face such threats from one group of religious zealots, we must not allow another group of religious zealots to dictate the future of our society. Particularly when (and this is my favourite of the whole bunch…)

• If you lived one mile from both a nuclear power plant and a coal-fired power plant, which would give you the highest radiation dose? Coal contains uranium, thorium, radon and carbon-14, all of which is ejected directly to the environment when it is burnt. The answer, counter-intuitive though it may be, is that the coal station gives you a higher dose.