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From The Times

January 10, 2008

A dark shadow behind nuclear power

The tough decision for Gordon Brown is really about coal, especially if Britain keeps shilly-shallying on energy

Camilla Cavendish

Talk about toxic. Nuclear power brings out the petulant in everybody. The industry fudges its figures. The green lobby stokes up safety fears. Liberal Democrats bleat that renewables should fill the energy gap, but oppose wind turbines in their own constituencies. Tories prevaricate and Gordon Brown, whose new year resolution is apparently to take “tough decisions” as long as they involve almost nothing of substance, will declare today that the British door is open to nuclear energy. In fact, the door has always been open. The only reason it was ever perceived to be closed was government's inability to guarantee a return to investors. But here the PM is indeed resolute: there will be no subsidy.

I am genuinely confounded by my country's failure to have a grown-up energy policy. I have never been ideological about nuclear. I don't think we can halt the global spread of warheads with sit-ins at Sizewell. I believe experts who say that secondary containment systems make a Chernobyl-type meltdown impossible. I do worry about nuclear waste. But I also care about climate change and energy security, which ministers say will worsen if we do not renew our nuclear capacity. If nuclear is part of the answer, I think we should get on with it.

Britain's clapped-out reactors are still our largest source of low-carbon energy. The electricity they produce creates about 15 tonnes of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour (after accounting for the carbon costs of reactors), compared with about 350 from gas and 900 from coal. If we don't replace our reactors, we will have to find some other way to supply a fifth of our electricity.

Greens complain that reactors will take too long to build, but they deliberately spin out the planning process. They fear that a nuclear push would divert investment from renewables and decentralised energy systems, both of which I agree are vital. But nuclear v renewables is a false choice.

Here's an idea. Why not outsource the problem? The French seem more sanguine about safety, less prissy about planning, have great engineers and more land to spare. We already import 2GW a year of nuclear electricity from France through an undersea cable. Why not more? This would kill concerns about planning law and about the waste, which would become someone else's problem. Unethical? Maybe, but so is prevaricating in the face of climate change. France has already decided to rebuild 19 of its 56 reactors (cue Gallic shrug). Why not cut a deal?

If this proposal infuriates both sides, that is my intention. The scale of the challenge surely merits a bit of lateral thinking. Too many people enjoy being entrenched in their outrage. The real question should be how we can best reduce carbon emissions by more than 60 per cent, some now say 80 per cent, in the next 20 years.

Here, ministers are clear. We need a package, they say. Renewable power is too intermittent to provide a total solution: you need energy efficiency and nuclear too. They are right, though still woefully short on detail. Germany has almost finished making its entire housing stock more energy efficient: English Heritage has a tantrum if anyone suggests double-glazing a window. Germany gets 13 per cent of its energy from renewables. Britain struggles to achieve 5 per cent. And the whole hoo-ha about renewables and nuclear has left the most important question unanswered: what to do about coal.

If Britain's nuclear reactors shut down tomorrow, the replacement would not be tidal or solar panels. (Our first marine turbine, I'm told, is languishing in its packaging on a Scottish dockside, because of a lack of heavy-lifting equipment.) No. It would be coal. The hard, crumbly, black stuff. The world is set to use a great deal of coal in the next 20 years, according to the International Energy Agency: about half of it in China and India, the rest principally in Europe and America. It's cheap, it's plentiful and there is no way to persuade these countries not to burn it. If we don't find a way to remove the carbon dioxide emissions from coal, experts seem to agree, there is no way that we can hope to combat climate change.

Luckily there is an answer. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) extracts carbon emissions from coal and pumps them underground, returning them to the geological fissures from which they came. The gas dissolves in water to form harmless carbonate. Neat? Yes. Proven? Not quite. There are few models, because CCS roughly doubles the cost of a new power plant. But if the West doesn't take a lead, there is scant chance of convincing Asia to follow.

The really “tough decision” facing the Government is not on nuclear. It is about how much to spend on CCS. Last week Kent councillors gave the go-ahead for a coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth, Britain's first in 24 years. Green groups rightly fear that this could be the first of a series, which could bury all hope of meeting CO2 targets. Government should obviously fund a CCS demonstration project at Kingsnorth. But the energy minister hasn't even bid for a budget.

At the end of this century, historians will wonder why we did not use all the technologies available to us. Our debates about nuclear will come to look petty in the extreme. And coal is the vast, dark shadow that hangs over us all. The Government has today taken a step in the right direction, by standing up for nuclear. If it intends to give guarantees over pricing, it may actually generate some action. But the really tough decisions that Mr Brown must take are on coal. The green lobby should be pressing him on that, not losing credibility with its futile fight against fission.

Hey Rod. Declare your interest.

McGlashan, Aberdeen,

The elephant in the room in energy debates is the fact that there is a tremendous amount of money at stake in what Camilla describes as "the futile fight against fission." Every time a modern nuclear plant begins operating, it will remove a market for approximately 1.7 BILLION cubic meters of natural gas per year. Though natural gas prices vary considerably over the course of a year, that gas would be worth about 250 Million pounds per year at an average cost of 150 pounds per 1000 cubic meters.

The people with the most to lose from new plants and continued operation of older, but still viable nuclear plants are the people that sell natural gas. It is no wonder that the anti-fission lobbies are so well funded and so persistent.

Fossil funded "greens" are selling snake oil and hiding their true color. In many cases, that color is Red since Russia is the swing supplier for much of the gas in Europe.

Rod Adams, Annapolis, USA / Maryland

Your position is interesting, but contains a factual error: Nuclear power is not as greenhouse gas free as you have been lead to believe.
Unlike coal and natural gas, which you take out of the ground and burn, uranium has to be refined, enriched and then fabricated into those nice neat pellets which undergo fission in the actual reactor. That enrichment process is energy intensive -- fueled by coal powered plants belching out all the gasses nuclear power claims not to emit. In addition, fabrication uses ozone-depleting CFCs with a modern plant dumping 300,000 pounds annually into the air. As a GHG, CFCs are 15x worse than CO2.
You cannot separate the end, refined pellet from the refining/enriching process when calculating the greenhouse gas output. In doing so, nuclear places ahead of coal, and behind natural gas.
Nuclear options it should be based on real facts, not industry spin.
Roger, Society of Environmental Journalists, USA

Roger, Teaneck, USA / New Jersey

Re. Jon Cooper's absurdly outraged response: RichardCr makes an excellent point which deserves much better. We are indeed creating CO2 emissions by, essentially, consuming. And the more people there are on the planet, and the more of us want to drive cars, buy luxury goods, heat our homes in winter, buy consumer electronics and so on... the more those emissions will rise unless we create a very different kind of energy infrastructure.

Paul I, London,

Ester Phillips, the goverment is spending well over Â£1billion per year of electricty consumers' money on renewable energy technologies such as wind, wave and solar power, a figure that will tripple by 2020. What more do you want?

Ben, London,

CCS would not double the cost of a coal fired power station. You take some of electricity produced and use electrolysis to produce hydrogen..

You then take the Co2 from the power station and put the hydrogen and Co2 in a "big blender" and bingo you have Methanol which you then sell as a replacement for petrol...

Methanol is an "old" fuel but is actually used in the US Champ Car race series.

DickW, Aberdeenshire, Scotland

Stephen - the figures are out by a factor of 1,000 (she means kg not tonnes)

Ben, London,

Let us build hundreds of the damned things.
We shall then be sure, sooner or later, to get our own Chernobyl.
We shall all be dead , but at least it will put paid to uncontrolled immigration. Long live the scorpions!

j.b.windmill, brierley hill, ENGLAND

Dennis L. Meadows (Club of Rome) once said. In the case of nuclear energy there are only two groups of people. Opponents and those who have not thought about it sufficiently."

It is highly regrettable, that the British Government bets on nuclear energy, for nuclear energy has no future and leads to a dead end. Why?:
1. Unranium is as fi nite as oil, gas and coal.
2. Nuclear waste remains poisonous fora million years.
3.The results of an accident are colossal and not tolerable(See Â£!)Chernobyl.
4. There is no such thing as a one hundred percent safe Nuclear power plant.
5. Nuclear energey is too expensive.
6. New Nuclear power plants don't save our climate.
7.In the Neighbourhood of nuclear plants, Leukemia in children is found significantly more often in children. Mike Wasworth (MRC) found that out in the UK some 30 years ago. Now similar results appear in Germany and the Government is taking these findings seriously and has them double checked.
So- hands of nuclear power!

Wirz, Hans, Porf. Dr. , Basel, Switzerland

One question for Mr Dwight Vandryver
How much uranium is there to be found in British soil?
Think before you launch....Reliance on uranium 100% great progress. What about solar, wind, waves you omit them just like the government does, yet they are freely available.
Do you have vested interests in certain energies???

Esther Phillips, Leatherhead,

not bad article. Pity you got your CO2 numbers out by a factor of 100. If you were right we wouldall be choking.

stephen bull, fontes, france

Well done, Camilla-nice to read a bit of independent (small i) thought for a change. Why is it that almost all the environmental correspondents in the media have their boloney detectors switched off, repeating the same old mantras ad nauseum?

Edward Welsh, Lampeter, Wales

If anyone cares to visit the DTI website (http://www.dti.gov.uk/energy/sources/coal/industry/page13125.html), in 2005 the coal demand stood at 62 million tonnes, with 20 million tonnes produced from UK mining. The website states that the remaining 42 million tonnes is imported. It means that not only is the UK heavily dependent on oil and gas imports, but also on coal imports. Clearly, as a means of securing energy self-suffiency, building more coal-fired power stations is nonsense, even with carbon sequestration.
At a rough calculation, a total of 142 million tonnes of CO2 is produced per year from gas, oil and coal fired stations. If CCS were used to pump this amount annually into the North Sea oil wells, it would leave a damning legacy for the future, far worse than that posed by a minuscule amount of nuclear waste.
And nuclear waste is only "waste" because the R&D has not been funded to fully exploit it as another source of energy.
Nuclear generated power is the only option.

Dwight Vandryver, Scholar Green, Cheshire

To win the argument for nuclear power you first have to cost and provide a disposal route for intermediate level waste. Currently every nuclear power station is storing temporarily or building temporary stores to house this waste.

You cannot assess the cost of nuclear power where there is not cost of disposal for waste. Whilst the government dilly dallies on this issue no progress will be made.

John, Egremont,

Ian (London) said:
"Why is geothermal power never considered in these debates? Italy, Iceland, New Zealand and Japan all have geothermal power stations it is not an unknown or dirty technology. Clean, silent, infinite supply. 90% of Iceland heat their homes with geothermal the remaining 10% use electricity. "

He is misguided. All of the above have in common a simple fact - that they lie on the junctions of tectonic plates. This is why Italy, New Zealand, Iceland and Japan have all suffered from volcanos and earthquakes.

Britain does not have these assets - nor have our cities ever been buried under ash or lava flows. That's why geothermal power isn't an option.

More fossil fuels - not an option. We don't have enough mountains for hydroelectric. Wind and solar power can't be relied upon to supply the majority of our electricity.

Nuclear is the only option. It's a safe form of electricity - WE ARE NOT THE SOVIETS!

Andrew, London, UK

The Prime Minister must invoke emergency powers on this matter.A massive engineering/ scientific program is immediately required under the direct control of the Prime Minister of Britain. All engineers and scientists in Britain should be drafted to the program for six months to assess and produce a program of development for â€œecoâ€“friendlyâ€ power generation systems. The matter is so urgent that it must take precedent over all other engineering and scientific work in the short term. Once a clear direction has been determined, only then can the Prime Minister make an informed decision in which direction Britain should and can move forward on the matter of eliminating the polluting power generating systems. This approach would also demonstrate that the Prime Minister values the technical and scientific community, and that he is leaving no stone unturned in his efforts to find a solution.

JIm Wills, Brisbane, Australia

Camilla Cavendish is spot on. Energy should not be about ideological preferences but about practical realities. The UK will need more nuclear but it will still consume more coal over coming decades, just as will the US, China, Australia and many other countries around the world. The ultimate question is not whether the world will use coal but how it will use it. Here the Government needs to fund carbon capture and storage. It is shameful that the UK's Carbon Abatement Technology Strategy spends many times less on this than is even invested voluntarily by the Australian coal companies through their COAL 21 programme. A country of 20 million again out does Britain.

Milton Catelin, London, UK

RichardCr (from Switzerland, home of your friendly neighbourhood euthanasia clinic), proposes some 'population reduction'. Zyklon B? Firing squads? Compulsory sterlisation?

Disgusting.

Jon Cooper, Herts, UK,

Why is geothermal power never considered in these debates? Italy, Iceland, New Zealand and Japan all have geothermal power stations it is not an unknown or dirty technology. Clean, silent, infinite supply. 90% of Iceland heat their homes with geothermal the remaining 10% use electricity.

In the past 20 years this country has become so backward with technological innovation it is disturbing.

Ian, London, UK

"The Energy Minister hasn't even bid for a budget" [for CCS at Kingsnorth]. Hang on: 1. The UK IS FUNDING the world's first demonstration project for post-combustion coal CCS; 2. The Government hasn't yet made a decision on Kingsnorth's construction anyway.

And on the idea of importing more (nuclear-sourced) electricity from France: 1. It's not the most energy-efficient way because some electricity is lost in transmission; 2. As energy becomes a more valuable resource, it's not in the national interest to import when we could equally well generate here; 3. The difficulties of nuclear generation (such as waste) don't respect national boundaries, or the English channel, so there's no benefit in passing the responsibility to others.

Heidi, London, UK

Here is the real genius of the scheme. You get the coal plants to buy carbon credits off the nuclear power plants. That way you can subsidise the nuclear with cheap coal !! Brilliant

Matt, U.K,

Faustino is absolutely right. Nuclear power looks like the expensive option at the moment, but after another decade of oil and gas price increases, it will become the cheap option.

Martin, Newmarket, Suffolk

When Putin's Russia takes over the continental part the EU I have no doubt the French would habitually capitulate and we would lose our energy supplies!

PETER CLOSE, berwick-upon-Tweed, UK

The plain fact is that it is people that create CO2 emissions -not by breathing but by consuming. If 6500 million people produce 10 zillion tonnes pf CO2 per annum, how much CO2 would 650 million people produce? But no politician would propose a programme of population reduction so we're stuck with consuming the earth's riches ever more rapidly and producing CO2.

However, the obstructionists who oppose the construction of new power plant for enviromental/conservation of natural habitat/whatever reason should give their names and addresses. The next time that the load on the electrical system exceeds the capacity of the generators (because the wind isn't blowing) then their towns would be the first to be switched off. That's fair isn't it.

RichardCr, Baden, Switzerland

If CCS doubles the cost of a coal-fired power station, it greatly improves the viability of nuclear power as an alternative.

Faustino, Brisbane, Australia

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Camilla Cavendish

Camilla Cavendish has been a McKinsey management consultant, an aid worker, and CEO of a not-for-profit company. She is now a leader writer and columnist on The Times