As a third potential new nuclear operator in the UK is announced, the arguments within the energy industry for nuclear and against renewables seem to be growing louder – or do they? Sue Wheat reports.
Those attending last week’s CBI Energy conference will no doubt have been heartened by yesterday’s (October 28) news that a third potential operator of
new nuclear energy in the UK has come forward.
A consortium, made up of French engineering giant GDF SUEZ, Spanish energy company Iberdrola and the UK’s Scottish and Southern Energy, has bought up land at Sellafield in Cumbria, bringing the total proposals for
new nuclear power stations up to 16 gigawatts (GW) of electricity – enough energy to power all the homes in Britain.
This was confirmation the UK was heading for a “
nuclear renaissance”, the Government declared yesterday – the very same thing the CBI was calling for in a new report released last Wednesday (October 21) ‘
Forging A Nuclear Renaissance: Making New Nuclear A Reality’.
Speaking at the
CBI Energy conference the day after the report was published, David Kidney, MP, Under Secretary of State for the Department of Environment and Climate Change, said the route to a “a healthier, greener life” was through providing “a mixed bag of
low carbon energy sources,” of which nuclear was a central strand.
Two days later, the independent think-tank, the New Economics Foundation organised a public conference in London, ‘
The Bigger Picture’, also focusing on a healthier, greener life. It was held as part of the ‘350’ international day of climate action proclaimed as “the most widespread day of political action in history” involving 5,200 events in 181 countries.
Both conferences were full of very well informed, well-intentioned people. Both were energetic, dynamic events full to capacity. Both talked with urgency about strategies to deal with the challenge of climate change.
Participants also faced the same core facts. We have signed up to EU targets to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent by 2020. As part of this package, the UK has a target to deliver 15 per cent of energy from renewable sources by 2020, a commitment that requires a seven-fold increase in
renewable energy consumption from current levels. The UK Government’s
Renewable Energy Strategy consultation suggests renewable generation should account for 32 per cent of total electricity generation by 2020 – more than double the projected share under current policies.
But there the commonalities end.
The title of the CBI’s new report gives a clear indication of the route it is proposing; 16 GW of
new nuclear is needed, it says, to replace sites being decommissioned and to meet growing energy needs in a low carbon way. That equates to 10-12 reactors based at 6-10 new UK plants.
Renewable energy is an important part of the mix, it insists, but warns it cannot meet the energy needs of the country quickly enough either to meet our carbon reduction targets, or to provide a secure energy supply. Government support for renewables should be downscaled, is the message, and upped for new nuclear if a national energy emergency within five to 10 years is to be averted.
“If the ‘lights were to go out’ it would be catastrophic,” said Barbara Green from the Energy Security Strategy department in the Department for Energy and Climate Change. Now, pretty much every aspect of our lives are dependent on energy – computers, phones, office and industrial security, healthcare, heating, transport, food, water supplies. “It would not be something the UK public could cope with for even two days, let alone longer.”
Delegate after delegate spoke out about
wind power (as the UK’s major renewable source) being technically not up to the task, unable to expand quickly enough, and unattractive to the public and investors.
“However well intentioned it is, the enormous money it will cost and physical aspects of the numbers of turbines means it is completely undeliverable by a significant margin. There’s a complete lack of reality,” said David Odlin of Oil and Gas UK. Government, he said, needs to change tack now by backing gas (a cleaner fuel than oil and coal) to fill the gap between the drop in fossil fuels, then speed up the building of nuclear to take over as the main low carbon fuel of the future.
At the New Economics Foundation conference, the route outlined couldn’t have been more different. Jeremy Leggett, chairman of Solar Century and one of the UK’s most respected proponents of
renewable energy, gave a clear message that renewables are the only way the UK can meet the climate challenge safely, cheaply, and in time.
“It’s amazing the propaganda that’s being pushed out for
nuclear and against renewables,” he said. “They say renewables can’t do the base load but it’s utter rubbish. How do I know? Because the Germans have done it already. In 2008 they mixed and matched renewables and ran the country on them at scale and in different weather conditions. We can do it here with imagination – and we will.”
“The problem is simple,” added Juliet Davenport, chief executive of
Good Energy, an organisation that develops the demand and supply of renewable electricity within the UK. “The Government has asked the wrong companies how to meet the targets – they’ve asked the companies that sell electricity to save electricity. We want to see the companies that deliver low energy to be the ones that are incentivised.”
On top of this, the hoary old arguments against nuclear have also not gone away, including that
nuclear is definitely not low carbon, safe or cheap at all.
There were two things that protagonists at both conferences seem to be in agreement on, however. The first is an impending global energy famine. “No-one can accuse us of scaremongering,” said Leggett. “Even TOTAL and the International Energy Agency are saying we have a problem. Without doubt, we will be forced to mobilise for our survival in the same way as our parents and grandparents were in the 1930s.”
The second is the fact that it is local planning committees and civil servants that are the biggest stops on progress towards UK energy security. “The longest wind power application we’ve had so far is eight years and counting,” said Sid Cox, director of EDF, the UK’s largest energy generator, who operate both renewable and nuclear sites, but is at the forefront of the new nuclear push.
And Leggett described the civil service energy meetings he’s been involved in as being “like 50 episodes of Yes Minister in slow motion.”
“We have to ask Government to lead,” Leggett asserted. “If they don’t, we won’t make our way through this.” It is a message both sides will be hoping David Kidney and his colleagues in Government will hear.
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