Caucus

By Michael Meacher MP

I want to put forward a rather different case from that made by Government and Opposition Front Benchers on the Energy Bill. In the last analysis, the Government’s case for nuclear was that it was needed tokeep the lights on and to help Britain to meet its climate change commitments. The Government also said that that could be achieved
without any public subsidies and that the waste problem would be perfectly manageable.

Sadly, it is clear from the evidence that all four of those statementsare very far from true.

First, nuclear power cannot keep the lights on because reactors take too long to build. The Government’s consultation conceded that even under their accelerated procedures, it would take at least eight years for construction to start. The consultation then assumed a five-year construction period. Optimistically, the earliest time at which a new nuclear power station could operate would be 2020, but that would be too late because, by then, there will be an energy gap in the order of 20 GW, which is the new electricity capacity that will be needed to replace obsolete nuclear and coal plants.

No nuclear station has been built on time or on budget in recent times. The average reactor takes three times as long to build, and costs twice as much, as was planned. Colin Challen MP referred to the plant in Finland, which is the only plant to have been built in Europe in a decade. It is already two years late—there has only been two years’
building—and it is something like £1 billion over budget, even with substantial subsidies from the Finnish and French Governments.

Secondly, it is false to claim that the only way in which we can slash our carbon emissions while delivering energy security is by building nuclear power stations. Nuclear cannot do that because half our energy demand is for heat, which is mainly gas-based, and the next biggest demand is for transport, which is mainly oil-based. Electricity generation,
which is where nuclear comes in, represents the smallest component of energy demand, and new nuclear would be a small portion of that. At present, nuclear supplies only 3.5 per cent. of our total energy and that figure is falling.

Thirdly, the Government say that there will be no hidden subsidies. Well, I wish that were true, but it is clearly not the case. Paragraph 3.73 of the White Paper indicates that the Government intend to put a cap on the cost of decommissioning for nuclear operators and then to provide a mechanism for the taxpayer to meet the cost. Paragraph 3.52 is the real
give-away when it says:

“If the protections we are putting in place through the Energy Bill prove insufficient, in extreme circumstances the Government may be called upon to meet the costs of ensuring the protection of the public and the environment.”

Those circumstances will not be extreme because the costs of decommissioning after 150 years—the time between the start of a new nuclear plant and point at which the waste is finally put in a geological repository—cannot be estimated. Those costs could increase exponentially.

The bill for decommissioning and dismantling existing plants is more than £70 billion and, according to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, a further £20 billion will be required for the disposal of waste. Those figures together are the equivalent of 7 per cent. of our entire gross domestic product.

Even those sums leave out two important liabilities for the public purse, one of which is what happens if a nuclear plant goes bust. That is not a figment of the imagination because let us not forget that when the nuclear holding company British Energy went bankrupt a few years ago, the taxpayer had to pay £5 billion to bail it out. The other liability arises
because the Government and the taxpayer will always remain the last- resort insurer in the case of a large nuclear incident. Again, that is not a figment of the imagination, because paragraph 2.66 of the White Paper admits that “we cannot dismiss the risk”.

In the light of all that, it is frankly disingenuous to suggest that here are no hidden subsidies.

Fourthly, the Government made the case in the consultation that he waste problem was manageable, but that is really pushing it. There are already 10,000 tonnes of long-life radioactive toxic aste in this country. According to the Government’s figures, there
will be 500,000 tonnes by the end of the century. The Committee on Radioactive Waste Management still has not come up with any solution.

In fact, there has been no progress at all since the last Conservative government finally abandoned the search for a nuclear dump in 1997. Where will the waste go? Let us not forget that that was one of the criticisms in the previous High Court ruling.

The industry makes the case that the quantities of waste will be considerably less this time. I am sure that that is true, but it is not the point. That waste will still be additional to the existing overload and, given the design, it will be more radioactive and hotter,
which will make it more difficult to manage. The waste problem has not been solved. Regrettably, there is no movement towards a solution.

The risks of nuclear proliferation and of cancer and leukaemia clusters around nuclear power stations—of course, that is much disputed — are certainly present, but I do not have space to deal with them.

Nuclear has been around for 50 or 60 years, so there have been plenty of opportunities to find a satisfactory, affordable and workable solution but as far as I know, no place in the world has succeeded in doing so. The Americans intended to put their waste under Yucca mountain, but they are withdrawing from that proposal. There is great uncertainty and a real problem.

The Government’s case does not stand up to examination for the reasons that I have given, but there is one other consideration that fundamentally alters the energy equation. The EU announced the mandatory targets for each EU country, so that we can achieve an
overall target of 20 per cent. of EU energy coming from renewable sources by 2020. The UK’s contribution to this will be 15%.

The crucial point is that we are talking about not just electricity generation but fuel for transport and heating. The contribution that renewables make to transport fuel is next to nothing, and their contribution to heating is relatively small, at least at the moment. The implication is surely that the UK will be required to generate 30 to 40 per cent. of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020. That is an eightfold increase. That means delivering on the promise to provide 33 GW from offshore wind power as well as kick-starting a range of measures.

There is not one simple panacea. There is a range of technologies, including renewable and decentralised technologies, in which Britain can lead the world; I am thinking particularly of wave and tidal power. Meeting the targets means building power stations that use
combined heat and power, and which achieve an efficiency of 90 per cent. plus, as has been done in Scandinavia. It means being able to burn cleaner fuels such as biomass, as well as fossil fuels. It means switching from the renewables obligation certificate system to
feed-in tariffs that give fixed prices, not variable support. Such tariffs have proved massively successful in Germany. There must also be an enormous improvement in energy efficiency.

If we do all those things, we will not need any nuclear power stations, but the crucial point is that we have to do those things if we are to meet the mandatory targets.