Article

EDINBURGH 19th March 2005

Nuclear Power? No Thanks!

The UK Press has been full of speculation for at least a year now that the Government is ready to launch a new nuclear power programme. The reaction from many environmental campaigners has, understandably, been one of disbelief and consequent inactivity.

The Government has been steadfastly sticking to its line that the nuclear option cannot be ruled out, though there are no proposals to build more reactors. But over the first few months of 2005 there has been a more worrying trend which has been beginning to suggest that Blair’s Government has decided it will support new reactors after the General Election, widely expected in May. That is why we have decided it is time to act and have launched this website.

The Independent on Sunday on 13th March 2005 reported that some of the world’s leading nuclear companies are lining up UK partners to prepare bids for an £8bn reactor-building programme. The newspaper said the Government has already signalled that it will publish a new energy White Paper after the election, which will propose the construction of new nuclear reactors to replace those now being taken out of service. So leading nuclear and construction companies, including French nuclear giant Areva, UK construction company Amec and BNFL’s US arm, Westinghouse, are already looking for potential partners ahead of any government move.

The Telegraph, on 16th February in a story headlined “Wind farms are all very well but nuclear energy is the way forward” said:

“Once the election is safely won, noises from Whitehall suggest that Labour will face reality and restart investment in nuclear.”

The Telegraph had started the speculation about a new White Paper following the General Election with a story on 30th January. It said the Government is understood to have decided not to reveal its plans until after the election because it believes the issue could be a vote loser. The newspaper pointed to a MORI opinion poll carried out for the Nuclear Industry Association which found that public opposition to replacement nuclear stations is falling. [See also The Times January 18th].

The Independent on 15th February reinforced the rumours that a decision has been taken with a story headlined “Blair to Press Nuclear Button” or “Blair set to take Nuclear Option” depending on which edition you read. According to the paper, Tony Blair is preparing to commit the UK to the biggest nuclear power programme since the 1960s, after the election, paving the way for the construction of up to 10 new nuclear stations.

The post-election White Paper would set out the case for nuclear power but stop short of spelling out how a new generation of reactors would be financed and built. Such a major about-turn in government policy, said The Independent, would almost certainly require a Cabinet reshuffle to bring supporters of nuclear power into the key posts of Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, and Secretary of State for Environment. The present incumbents, Patricia Hewitt and Margaret Beckett, are both anti-nuclear.

We shouldn’t allow this newspaper speculation to disable us by inducing panic. The Independent on 15th February also detailed the practical obstacles to reviving nuclear construction, as listed by British Energy, which it said remain daunting. We will come back to these.

And the last Energy White Paper [view as pdf]– published in February 2003
said:

“… the current economics of nuclear power make it an unattractive option … and there are important issues of nuclear waste to be resolved … Before any decision to proceed with the building of new nuclear power stations, there would need to be the fullest public consultation and the publication of a white paper setting out the Government’s proposals.”

Solving these problems, if indeed solutions exist, will take time. There is unlikely to be an announcement about new nuclear stations immediately after the election. Martin O’Neil, the Labour MP who chairs the House of Commons Trade and Industry Committee, told the Business on Sunday (27th February) that a new White Paper is likely around February 2006.

Energy Minister Mike O'Brien told the Nuclear Industry Association (NIA) Energy Choices 2004 Conference on 2nd December, that it is up to the private sector to prove that nuclear power is economic:

" ... at the moment there is no commercial proposition on the table... If we thought that a [nuclear] project was a commercially serious proposition we would look at it."

He said the nuclear industry would have to come up with an economically viable proposal before the Government would consider building new nuclear stations. If new nuclear stations are to be built, the private sector must come up with the cash. So the reality is that the government would happily consider an application for nuclear power stations right now from anyone who wants to build them. But no one is offering.

Even if a White Paper was produced, in the way The Independent suggested, it would take us no further forward because it would stop short of spelling out how nuclear power would be financed.

So it is time, not to panic but to get organised. Tom Burke, former Director of Friends of the Earth in London and former adviser to various Tory Environment Ministers, said in The Guardian on 2nd March that the stories about Blair just waiting for the General Election to be over to put out a White Paper setting out the case for 10 new nuclear reactors are as much news to No 10 as they are to the public. No doubt they accurately reflect the aspirations of nuclear advocates, but just because they were successful in persuading some journalists doesn’t mean we should panic. It is clearly all part of an orchestrated campaign by the nuclear industry.

“The brutal truth”, said Burke, “is that no one has yet managed to work out a way of getting nuclear reactors to burn uranium as effectively as they burn money - though extraordinary creativity has gone into concealing this from public view. Nor has anyone yet discovered how to make atoms work for peace without making them available for war”.

Platts Nuclear News Flashes reported on 28th February on a speech by BNFL’s Chief Executive, Michael Parker, to a waste management conference in Tucson, Arizona. Parker said Carbon Taxes would definitely benefit nuclear power, if the UK were to revisit the issue, but they wouldn't be enough on their own to encourage new nuclear build in the U.K. He said discussions are under way now on how to create the right environment for new nuclear. Does he mean discussions between the UK’s two virtually bankrupt nuclear companies, British Energy (BE) and British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) on how best to get their hands on taxpayers' money to subsidise new reactors? Or perhaps it is consumers’ money the industry is chasing by proposing a return to a nuclear or non-fossil fuel obligation? The Industry is clearly hoping climate change will prove so important that it will provide the justification for some sort of subsidy to the industry.

It is not hard to understand investors' reluctance to back new nuclear stations. It’s a huge investment with no return for at least seven years. According to the nuclear industry the economics of nuclear power – in terms of electricity generation – begin to make sense if you order 10 reactors: that’s the only way they get the costs on a par with wind energy. And you have to hope governments remain willing to help fund waste and decommissioning liabilities and go on underwriting insurance costs. When the Cabinet Office’s Policy and Innovation Unit (PIU) examined those claims it didn’t find them believable.

If public money is going to have to be spent to drive carbon out of the economy, then any government is going to want the biggest carbon bang for its buck. Nuclear power is probably one of the least efficient ways of spending our money. Investment in energy efficiency typically displaces up to seven times the amount of carbon dioxide as investment in nuclear power. Over coming months this website will provide information on why nuclear power isn’t the answer to climate change.

In setting out the practical obstacles to a nuclear revival to The Independent, British Energy mentioned four barriers.

First Britain needs an agreed nuclear waste management policy. The Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM) is working towards making its recommendations on waste management options to the Government by July 2006. It is difficult to see the sense in a new Energy White Paper until after we have had time to digest these recommendations. We already know from CoRWM’s work on the Radioactive Waste Inventory that a programme of ten new reactors would more than double the amount of high level waste or spent fuel we will be left to deal with – depending on whether spent fuel continues to be reprocessed or not, which it almost certainly won’t be.

Gordon MacKerron, Chair of CoRWM has pointed out that the nuclear waste issue will not be resolved in July 2006. This might be a significant moment in the process, but CoRWM is only the ‘front-end’ of a very long process – the issue will not be resolved just because recommendations have been made on the best option for nuclear waste management. It is quite likely that a site selection process will be required after July 2006. Environment Minister, Elliot Morley has explained
[Government’s Response to House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology report on “Radioactive Waste Management” page9 [view as pdf] how the Government intends to move forward:

“Once CoRWM’s recommendations have been delivered in July 2006, Government has decided policy in light of it, and the facility or facilities required are clear, we foresee that the process and criteria to be adopted for a site selection will also be the subject of discussion in an open and transparent way.”

Second, BE says there needs to be an agreed reactor technology approved by UK regulatory authorities. If nuclear stations are given the go-ahead, the untried and untested BNFL/Westinghouse AP1000 design would still have to be licensed by the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII). There might be other designs in contention too, like the Canadian Advanced Candu Reactor or the French European Pressurised Water Reactor. It would take the NII at least two or three years. But the NII is short on staff and resources, meaning licensing and preparing for subsequent planning inquiries could be very problematic. [See Sunday Herald 6th February “Nuclear Watchdog exposes Safety Crisis” by Rob Edwards]

Third, BE says we need a planning system which deals with planning issues rather than technical and safety ones – in other words the time spent on public inquiries needs to be reduced, curtailing the one chance the public has to have a democratic input into this process. Any changes to the planning process will be very controversial for the Government to introduce.

Finally BE says it needs a market structure which supports investment in new plant. Apart from wanting subsidies, as already discussed, BE is possibly eyeing jealously the low-cost bank loans and export credit guarantees, received by the Finnish utility Teollisuuden Voima Oy (TVO) and Areva and Siemens, suppliers of the EPR reactor-type being built in Finland. These are currently the subject of a complaint by the European Renewable Energies Federation (EREF) [view as pdf] to the EC and calls have been made for the EC to investigate illegal State Aids.

But these are just the barriers which BE is prepared to admit to. New Nuclear Monitor – the occasional publication of the Nuclear Free Local Authorities – deals extensively with the hurdles to a nuclear revival. As New Nuclear Monitor puts it - the public will need to be convinced that the new generation of reactors will have an acceptable standard of safety and security. For example there should be no physically credible events which could require off-site actions. This is likely to require the development of reactor designs that could survive high impact events, such as the deliberate crashing of a commercial jet airliner. After September 11th 2001 one might have expected that new reactors would be designed to be less vulnerable to terrorist attack. With the BNFL/Westinghouse AP1000 design, the reactor type most likely to be built in the UK, the reverse appears to be the case. It is called an inherently safe system, but there is nothing inherently safe about highly hazardous plant, which has a fuel core packed with highly radioactive spent fuel. In fact, the suspicion is that the AP1000 design is more about saving money than improving safety. The AP1000 is basically a type of “Pressurised Water Reactor” (PWR), like the Sizewell B reactor, but with many of the safety systems stripped out. Major cost savings perhaps, but by sacrificing some of the structural integrity of the dome, the AP1000 could be less able to withstand accidents and deliberate actions such as aircraft impact and nearby explosion.

With reprocessing extremely unlikely to be the chosen nuclear waste method for a new generation of reactors, each reactor will have a spent fuel pond nearby, similar to Sizewell B’s which represents ten times the radioactive inventory released during Chernobyl.

The public is going to find it very hard to understand why, if the situation is so serious with regard to terrorism that we need to lock up suspects without trial, or place people under house arrest and admit evidence obtained under torture, and yet the government appears to be very relaxed about the possibility of a large aircraft, full of fuel, flying into a nuclear reactor – so relaxed that we can contemplate the creation of 10 more potential Chernobyls on British soil.

Over the past couple of years the news has been full of stories which show the intimate connection between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Developments in Iran, North Korea, India and Pakistan highlight the holier than thou “Do as I say – Not as I do” attitude of the UK and US, and other weapons states. Although there may not be any immediate danger of new nuclear reactors in the UK leading to a proliferation of nuclear weapons, every time we in the West build a new nuclear facility, it justifies the construction of facilities in other countries which may be used as a smoke screen for a clandestine nuclear weapons programme.

Sellafield has a stockpile of over 60 tonnes of UK-owned weapons-useable civil plutonium which could climb to over 100 tonnes by about 2012. And yet Britain has absolutely no use for it. If there is a new reactor programme in the UK there is a risk that at least some of them would be fuelled with plutonium - MOX fuel (perhaps 100%). This will mean armed convoys delivering the fuel. We’ve already been forced to accept that armed Atomic Energy Constabulary police officers should guard all our nuclear facilities, and waste transports. These police also have the power to go in hot pursuit of suspects. Armed MOX convoys will be yet another chipping away of our civil liberties and for what? The armed convoy that recently transported the US plutonium 600 miles across France to be converted into MOX was a farce. [See New Scientist News 15th March 2005]. At one point the convoy pulled into a petrol station for refuelling. Any terrorist armed with a cigarette lighter could have caused a disaster if so inclined.

Logically the world would have to separate plutonium from spent fuel and build fast reactors – powered by weapons- useable plutonium - if nuclear power is to make a significant contribution to reducing carbon emissions - because recoverable supplies of uranium will probably only last around another 60 years at current rates of consumption unless we start making use of plutonium. [See OECD Nuclear Energy Agency]

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – along with several other commentators - has pointed to the “security nightmare” caused by trying to deal with climate change by building nukes. [See Greenpeace] Reason enough on its own to reject the nuclear option.

Rather than panicking, our contribution to halting the current drive towards re-starting nuclear construction in the UK, is this website, which we hope will provide you with the well-referenced information you need to join the campaign, and the inspiration to actually take some action. If you remember the old SCRAM [Scottish Campaign to Resist the Atomic Menace] Safe Energy Journal which was published between 1977 and 1998 you should have an idea of the ethos behind this website. There are several sources of information on the case against building new nuclear stations. If you only have the time or the inclination to read short briefings this is not the site for you. We hope to be able to provide a source of information for people who want and need the detail. You’ll find links to other websites in the Online Resources Section. The links will also point you to those local campaigns, which have their own websites.

Lets work together to make sure the recent pro-nuclear campaign heralds the last final gasp of a dying industry, rather than a nuclear renaissance.

No2nuclearpower editorial team