This is an individual contribution to the government's Nuclear Power consultation. The main environmental groups withdrew from the consultation because they considered it to be a sham, the information given being totally one-sided. The government's PDF document is here:
http://nuclearpower2007.direct.gov.uk/bgo/consultationdocs.asp
Note that the original lengthy set of web pages to which much of this contribution below refers, have now been removed.
The sections below are answers to the questions posed in the consultation.
To see some ways in which we could reduce carbon emissions and provide the energy we need, with renewable resources and no nuclear power, see the excellent study Zero Carbon Britain by CAT in Wales http://www.zerocarbonbritain.com/ . Also worth looking at is the fascinating work of the Club of Rome on a European grid supplied partly by Concentrating Solar Power http://www.trecers.net/ , an example of which is the new CSP plant that commenced operation this year in Seville.
These
are the recorded submissions. Only sections to which responses have
been recorded are listed below.
Your
response:
Humans
look set to burn in a mere two hundred years the entire legacy of
fossil fuels that was laid down over a period of hundreds of millions
of years. Efforts to prevent resource exhaustion and limit damage to
the environment will fail unless global population stabilises and
consumption of resources per capita is reduced, so the UK must
participate with other countries in a global effort to tackle climate
change. We must of course find ways to reduce the UK's own CO2
emissions and ensure that we have light, warmth and transport.
However the methods by which the UK decides to do this will influence
the course taken by other nations, both by example and because our
investments in a chosen technology will advance that technology and
make it more feasible and economic for others to use. For this reason
we should invest in those technologies that can be safely copied by
most other countries. Most of the few hundred existing Nuclear power
plants are located in the most advanced and stable countries and yet
have still suffered a succession of disastrous accidents (at least
40,000 deaths from increased cancers from Chernobyl alone). If even
these countries cannot run the few existing plants safely, there is
no hope of extending nuclear to all countries without irrevocably
poisoning the planet. In any case there is not enough uranium that
can be economically mined to provide fuel to a nuclear powered world
for more than a couple of years. Nuclear remains what it always has
been: a costly and dangerous dead end.
Your
response:
When
I studied engineering at university in the 1970s my professor told us
that in the 20 years since the first nuclear power station was
switched on in Britain, the industry had just reached the point where
it had generated more energy than had been put into the construction
of the plants.
My professor highlighted the fact that the
energy accounting analysis of nuclear power stations is far from
favourable. Enormous amounts of energy are required for construction,
for mining and preparation of the fuel, and for the maintenance for
thousands of years of radioactive waste. As a result no net energy
will be produced for many years and at the end of their life they
become an energy drain again for generations. Since most of these
energy inputs will come from fossil fuels, nuclear is not carbon
neutral. Recent work by Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith
demonstrates that as the world moves to exploit the leaner uranium
ores, the CO2 lifecycle emissions of nuclear will exceed those of a
gas-fired station. Furthermore their analysis uses conservative
estimates of the energy required to decommission nuclear stations and
store the wastes. The estimated cost of decommissioning UK nuclear
plants has recently spiralled to over £70bn: the energy cost
may reasonably be expected to follow a similar path.
A key
consideration that is missed in the government's analysis is that
estimates of nuclear costs whether in financial, energy or CO2 terms
or are notoriously unreliable. The reason for this unreliability is
that each nuclear power station is a giant one-off engineering
project. With only tens of plants in any one country and four hundred
worldwide, every new plant is essentially a prototype. Factors such
as local geology also dictate differences. One-off projects on this
scale are notorious for cost over-runs, construction delays and
unreliable performance. Mass production on the other hand, leads to
cheap reliable products because constant repetition allows design and
manufacture to be optimised, e.g. washing machines, cars or PCs.
Combined heat and power schemes, wind turbines and solar panels all
lend themselves to mass production: already there are tens of
thousands of wind turbines in Europe. These lightweight technologies
plus increased energy efficiency are the way forward, not unreliable
and unpredictable nuclear dinosaurs.
Just to clean up the
existing UK nuclear mess is now estimated to cost about £75bn.
For about half of that money we could build 26 Giga Watt of offshore
wind turbines producing 20% of our electricity needs (this figure
allows for intermittency of the wind). This could consist of 13,000
2MW turbines. It sounds like a lot, but the motor industry builds
about 2 million cars a year for the UK market. Building wind turbines
is a similar type of metal-manufacture to cars and if we built the
whole 13,000 turbines in a single year, we would only be building one
turbine for every 154 cars built that year.
Your
response:
The
security of supply or "without nuclear the lights will go out"
argument is often heard. In practice nuclear also suffers from
intermittency with whole stations having to be shut down at short
notice because of leaks - often remaining closed for weeks or months.
At the end of the day nuclear only supplies a fifth of electric power
in the UK. If we were to rely on clean renewable energy in the future
many engineers and scientists are confident that we could maintain a
reliable supply. But even in the worst case that we experienced a few
exceptional days when electricity supply was limited, is the lights
going out for a few hours the worst possible thing that could happen
to us in the future? It is salutary to remember that all previous
generations managed without any electricity (my father remembers it
being installed in his childhood home) and most countries today have
far less regular supply than ours. The problem of a power cut is
resolved the moment the lights come back on - quite the opposite of
the legacy of radioactivity in the environment which will last for
centuries.
Nuclear also relies on imported components and
uranium. Developing indigenous renewables is much more secure.
Finally renewables by their nature are for the most part a
distributed system in which the loss of any one unit is not critical.
Thus they are far more resistant to disruption by for example
terrorist attack or war.
Your
response:
I
don't have much faith in the capital and operating costs presented
here, however I'm more worried by two other areas of cost: (1)
Dismantling of nuclear reactors and storage of waste; (2) The
'external' costs of security and war associated with nuclear
proliferation, and of long term contamination of the
environment.
Dismantling of the reactors and storage of waste
is estimated at less than £1 billion per station. This seems
low considering that the in 2005 the cost of decommissioning the
existing sites was forecast to be £55.8 billion, the estimate
then increased in 2006 to about £72 billion (plus £5.3
billion in relation to spent nuclear fuels) and is rumoured now to
have reached £90 billion. Given that there are 24 reactors,
this would seem to give a cost of over £3.2bn per reactor.
Furthermore only a fraction of the staggering end-of-life costs are
taken into account because of the economic technique of
'discounting'. I would argue that discounting should not be applied
in this case because of the long time-scales involved and the huge
risk and uncertainty associated with handling and storing nuclear
debris. The idea of discounting is that we include only a fraction of
future costs in the estimate of overall lifetime cost because we
could invest that smaller sum and it would grow to be big enough by
the time the costs are incurred. Can we have any confidence that such
a fund will really be set up and will grow faster than the costs
appear to be growing? Not if the lack of a fund to cover the existing
£77bn decommissioning costs is anything to go by. Worse still,
can discounting give a sensible answer at all? Over periods of many
decades huge costs can be discounted to minor ones giving nonsensical
answers. For example we could include in our costings the expense of
building replacement nuclear power stations in 50, 100 and 150 years
time, which suitably discounted would appear to make nuclear energy
much cheaper. Alternatively we could include in the analysis of wind
energy the discounted cost of fully refurbishing the wind turbine
moving parts when they wear out AND of establishing a new fund at
that time to do the same again when they next wear out, etc. By thus
extending the life of the windfarm indefinitely we could argue that
wind energy is free. Given that the costs of solar, wind, wave and
tidal technologies are all falling and that they are all involve
straightforward and non-hazardous manufacture of large numbers of
identical units, this seems a much more realistic assertion than
predicting low future costs for nuclear.
Nuclear should also
include a factor for the costs of wars and military build up caused
or partly cased by nuclear proliferation. The invasion of Iraq was
supposedly partly because Saddam Hussain was acquiring nuclear
material. This war has cost the UK an estimated $7.5 billion and the
US a figure that may be over $1 trillion, apart from the cost in in
lives to Iraq.
Your
response:
What
are missing are the other possible sources of energy. There is no
reference to solar at all and wave and tidal energy are mentioned
only to say “there are uncertainties over the speed with which some
renewable technologies such as wave and tidal power will develop”
... which is true largely because successive UK governments have made
little or no investment in them but poured billions of pounds into
nuclear. Let's look at some of the alternatives:
1)
Concentrated solar power (CSP)
German scientists calculate that
covering just 0.5% of the world’s deserts with a technology called
concentrated solar power (CSP) would provide the world’s entire
electricity needs, with desalinated water for desert regions as a
valuable byproduct, as well as air-conditioning for nearby
cities.
Europe, North Africa and the Middle East could build a new
high-voltage direct current electricity grid to transport electricity
from a variety of sources. Together the region could provide all its
electricity needs by 2050 with barely any fossil fuels and no nuclear
power. CSP plants already exist in several countries: Spain opened a
plant near Seville this year and work has begun on a plant in
Algeria. Costs of CSP electricity are competitive with oil and could
eventually compete with natural gas.
Solar energy can also be
captured within the UK by PV or thermal solar panels fitted to
buildings. Figures from the DTI indicate savings of around 500
kWh/year/m2 of thermal (hot water) collector. Thus if we had a
typical 4m2 collector on every house we would get 52,000 GWh per year
or the equivalent of more than six 1GW nuclear power stations. Of
course not all homes are suitable but there are many other buildings
that are.
2) Wave Energy
The worldwide wave power potential
has been estimated to be around 8,000-80,000TWh/y (1-10TW), which is
the same order of magnitude as world electrical energy consumption.
In 2001 the Science and Technology Committee reported that, based on
estimates from the DTI's Energy Technology Support Unit (ETSU), in
the UK alone, wave energy devices could practicably contribute more
than 50 Twh/y. An early UK lead in wave power research was stopped by
Mrs Thatcher in the 1980's (who funded nuclear instead) but now the
UK is starting to produce machines again although it is the
Portuguese who are buying the first commercial models!
3)
Tidal Power
Estimates of tidal energy released by the DTI,
suggests that 3000GW of tidal energy is available worldwide though
much of it not in areas suitable for power generation. Regarding the
UK, a submission from the OU to the Select Committee on Science and
Technology states “Tidal power devices might ultimately supply up
to 20 per cent of UK electricity with minimal environmental impacts.
As with wave power, given the UK's maritime history and its extensive
offshore engineering experience coupled with the major energy
resource offshore, it would be perverse to ignore this option.”
Your
response:
"licensing
a nuclear power plant is in my view, licensing random premeditated
murder."
These are the words of Dr. John Gofman, the
pre-eminent Manhattan Project nuclear scientist and medical
physician, who died earlier this year. In the course of his
scientific career, Gofman came to believe that commercial nuclear
power was no less than "premeditated random murder". In
1979 Gofman wrote "Every responsible organization studying
radiation injury now holds that cancer, leukemia, and genetic damage
must be considered to be essentially proportional to dose, down to
the very lowest radiation doses." After excruciating feet
dragging, The National Academy of Science's BEIR VII Committee
confirmed this only last year. Gofman states, "In one year of
operation , a 1000-megawatt nuclear power plant generates fission
products (like Strontium-90 and Cesium 137) in a quantity equal to
what is produced by the explosion of 23 megatons of nuclear fission
bombs--or more than one thousand bombs of the Hiroshima-size."
The
government's presentation in this section misleads the public when it
states “The UK has not had an incident at a civil nuclear power
station where there has been an offsite release of radioactive
material” because there HAS been a massive release of radioactivity
following a fire at a UK reactor not classed as 'civil': the
Windscale number one reactor in Cumbria whose purpose was plutonium
production for bombs. The Windscale Nuclear Plant, now renamed
Sellafield vents its wastes into the Irish Sea and has turned it into
one of the most radioactive bodies of water in the world. The Irish
Government is using every diplomatic, political and legal route
available to bring about the closure of the Sellafield plant.
Ireland’s concerns are reinforced by the poor ongoing safety record
at Sellafield and the recent serious incident at the THORP Plant in
April 2005.
The analysis by the European Commission suggesting
that the probability of a major accident - the meltdown of the
reactor's core along with failure of the containment structure - is
one in 2.4 billion per reactor year in the UK smacks of hubris of the
worst kind. There are currently about 440 operating reactors in the
world, so we have no more than 12,000 or so years of reactor
operation. So far we have had several major accidents (Windscale
fire, Three Mile Island, etc) and a meltdown with breaching of the
containment structure at Chernobyl. That gives a one in 12,000
probability per reactor year, i.e. TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND TIMES MORE
LIKELY, based on real evidence. Does the government think that
Chernobyl doesn't count because it regards Russian technology as
'inferior'? The Russians built a plane very similar to Concord
nicknamed Concordski, which crashed in 1973, whereas our Concord flew
for many years without ever crashing until one day tragically it did.
It is extreme naivety to suppose that Britons are immune to mistakes,
incompetence and unforeseen circumstances.
Your
response:
The
public (rightly) has so little confidence in the nuclear industry
that no-one wants movements of radioactive waste on a road or rail
line near them. An accident may be very unlikely but the impact would
be terrible. Are private insurers willing to fully cover the risk?
The threat of terrorist action is also now very much greater.
The
problem for nuclear power is that the only acceptable level of
accidents is zero because of the appalling consequences of a major
radiation leak. If the UK chooses nuclear power it cannot hope to
persuade other countries not to do so - and some of those countries
will have far lower standards of infrastructure and safety than the
UK. Even the richest and most technologically sophisticated
industrial country has not managed to look after its bridges
properly. Following Minnesota bridge collapse earlier this year in
the USA, it has been revealed that about 77,000 bridges across
America share the same "structurally deficient" rating as
the one that collapsed. Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the
senate, said that domestic programmes, such as replacing ageing
infrastructure, had been shortchanged because of the billions being
spent on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Your
response:
In
considering how the nuclear industry can be expected to guard waste
in the future we may reasonably look at their past record. At the
Dounreay fast breeder reactor a tunnel was bored out to sea, taking
liquid 'low-level' radioactive waste 600 yards offshore. During
construction a 15ft-diameter shaft was created and into this they
dropped high level radioactive waste for 20 years until in 1977, a
hydrogen explosion blew the lid off the shaft, scattering radioactive
material. For some tens of thousands of years, any escape of waste
from the shaft would be highly dangerous, and unless a breakwater is
built, the sea will breach the shaft in about 200 years. The UKAEA
has had to resort to searching old logbooks and asking retired
workers to find out what was dumped. The reactors at the site are all
shut but Dounreay clean-up work at the site will employ hundreds of
people and absorb billions of pounds.
Your
response:
There
is no way of rendering nuclear waste safe except waiting for it to
decay over many millennia. Disposing consists therefore of just
burying it somewhere for our descendants to deal with. Had Stonehenge
been a nuclear power station, for the benefit of a mere 40 years
worth of electricity 3500 years ago, we would still be dealing with
its waste. Can we really suppose that waste buried today will be
carefully tended for thousands of years to ensure that it is not
leaking or accidentally dug up, when we are not even sure what was
buried at Dounreay in living memory. Our great grand children living
in the 22nd century will get no benefit from nuclear power because
the viable ores will have long been exhausted and the reactors shut
down. What they will get is the poisonous legacy of waste. They will
curse us.
Your
response:
Grossly
misleading figures are presented in this section by the government.
It is stated that “the land necessary to build a 1.2GW nuclear
power station is estimated at 25-75 hectares, compared to estimates
by the British Wind Energy Association of 10,000 hectares for a 1GW
windfarm.” Of course a windfarm extends over a larger area, but as
the BWEA spells out on its website: “Less than 1% of this land
would be used for foundations and access roads, the other 99% can
still be used for productive farming.” So 1.2GW of wind energy
capacity would actually use only 100 hectares – APPROXIMATELY THE
SAME AS A COAL OR NUCLEAR PLANT. Furthermore most of this is the
gravel access tracks - hikers and grazing animals can walk on or
across these and right up to the base of the turbines. The only area
no longer accessible is that occupied by the towers themselves. A
1.2GW windfarm would require about 600 turbines of 2MW each, and the
4.3m diameter towers would therefore occupy a total of 0.87 hectares
... the wind turbines occupy 100 TIMES LESS SPACE than equivalent
coal or nuclear plants!!
NOTE:
The government DO qualify this area calculation in the more detailed
information given in the supporting PDF file BUT the web page for
this section (now removed) did not; it simply stated that the
windfarm covered a vast area.
Some
much more informative comparisons between windfarms and nuclear
plants would be the following:
1) How much land has been made
unsafe for humans by these technologies?
a) Windfarms: None.
b)
Nuclear Plants: Clear totals for contaminated land are hard to come
by (Data from the U.S. Department of Energy says 0.54 million acres
of land in the USA are contaminated with radioactive waste though it
is unclear what proportion is due to civil nuclear power). In 1983
large amounts of highly contaminated seaweed were washed up on the
beaches near Sellafield and many kilometres of beach were officially
closed to the public. Radioactive waste in the silt at the bottom of
the Ravenglass estuary has shifted towards the western coast of
Scotland and has polluted many islands with its radiation. Some of
the radioactive silt has even been found in Greenland, Norway and
Ireland. Abroad, 99% of the land of Belarus has been contaminated to
varying degrees above internationally accepted levels as a result of
the Chernobyl explosion. The plutonium released by the Chernobyl
explosion has a half-life of 24,400 years. The 30 kilometre
contaminated exclusion zone has been expanded to 70km and has been
dubbed ‘Death Valley’ by the locals. This situation will continue
forever.
2) How much food has been made unfit for human
consumption by these technologies?
a) Windfarms: None.
b)
Nuclear Plants: In the UK after the Windscale fire, radioactive
contamination of milk resulted in a ban on milk distribution over a
total area of 200 square miles, to a distance of 30 miles from the
plant. Restrictions in the UK due to Chernobyl affected 9,700 farms
and 4.2 million sheep. They still apply (in 2006) to 83,100 hectares
and 200,000 sheep.
3) What is the increased risk of leukemia
to children living nearby?
a) Windfarms: None.
b) Nuclear
Plants: 21% (source European Journal of Cancer Care).
Your
response:
Cost
is not the only factor. Work by Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip
Smith demonstrates that as the world moves to exploit the leaner
uranium ores, the CO2 lifecycle emissions of nuclear will exceed
those of a gas-fired station. The energy cost of extraction also
rises.
Your
response:
Training
more people in the skills of building nuclear reactors and handling
nuclear materials fans the flames of nuclear proliferation. How many
bomb-making reactors around the world are the result of 'skills
transfer' from civil nuclear power? It would be far wiser to develop
the skills of British engineers and scientists in safe renewable
technologies for which there is a ready market around the world as
the Dutch wind industry, Spanish CSP developments and our own nascent
wave energy industry demonstrate.
Your
response:
This
area illustrates again the the failure of nuclear power. The nuclear
dream was to have an industry at Sellafield reprocessing spent fuel,
and fast breeder reactors to generate new fuel. The French and
British fast breeders are closed and it appears that government has
given up on reprocessing for new nuclear.
'Recycling' is a
curious word to apply to radioactive wastes. Normal non-radioactive
substances can often be recycled by composting, melting down or
whatever. But radioactive wastes can only be re-arranged by
separating one of the wastes from another, shuffled from one dump to
a 'better' one, or simply thrown into the sea to spread around the
world - "regulated radioactive discharges". This is the
legacy we propose to leave to our descendants.
Your
response:
Nuclear
power was born out of the nuclear weapons programmes of the victors
of the second world war and remains inextricably linked to nuclear
weapons. For years countries subsidised their 'civilian' nuclear
industries in order to provide a flow of bomb-making material. The
more widespread and available nuclear power becomes, the more
countries will have the ability to make a bomb. Countries with a
nuclear industry find it difficult to resist the temptation to recoup
some of the expense by selling them abroad.
The more reactors
there are scattered around the world, the greater the chance of
fissile material such as plutonium falling into the hands of
terrorists or unstable governments. Recent history illustrates all to
well the dangers: The French supplied a nuclear plant to Iraq which
in 1981, just before it could be turned on, the Israeli airforce
bombed. The Israeli Government explained its reasons for the attack
in a statement saying: "The atomic bombs which that reactor was
capable of producing whether from enriched uranium or from plutonium,
would be of the Hiroshima size. Thus a mortal danger to the people of
Israel progressively arose." The possibility that Iraq might
acquire nuclear material was stated by the UK government in the
famous 'dossier' as one of the main justifications for the 2003 US
and British invasion of Iraq. Currently European and US governments
are preoccupied with the fear that Iran's avowedly peaceful nuclear
power programme is a cover for developing a bomb and there is talk of
a war with Iran. A similar fear existed with North Korea until the
recent deal to close its reactors and give up its bomb.
The
decades ahead are full of uncertainty and risk. Climate change and
unchecked population growth will bring hunger and mass migrations.
Nations will vie to secure access to scarce resources such as oil and
water. These conditions are almost certain to provoke wars and sudden
changes of regimes. There could scarcely be a worst world into which
to introduce a new set of nuclear power stations generating tons more
fissile material for bomb-making. To cap it all just as oil and gas
run out almost completely in the second half of this century, these
reactors will also require dismantling placing a huge cost on our
children who simultaneously will be faced with making massive
investments to build renewable energy systems. Many states are likely
to be so weakened by economic recession that they are unable even to
pay the salaries of staff maintaining and guarding the ageing nuclear
installations - a scenario already too familiar following the
collapse of the USSR.
Your
response:
I
believe that investment in new nuclear would be an enormous waste of
public money in an energy industry that has no future except as a
source of danger to the public. Many billions of pounds have been
pumped into nuclear while other promising energy technologies have
been given tiny sums in comparison, e.g. the DTI's Low Carbon
Buildings Programme provides just £6.5m over 3 years to
subsidise the use of renewables by households. This is less than one
two thousandth of the governments estimated cost for one nuclear
power station. Yet the DTI's own figures show that solar water
heating alone could produce as much as 6 nuclear power stations at a
fraction of the cost.
The nuclear issue also produces an
unhealthy focus on electricity production, diverting attention from
space heating and transport that are the larger part of our energy
use and that will never be supplied by nuclear. The runaway growth in
air travel and motor vehicle use will wipe out any conceivable
reduction in CO2 emissions that could be made by generating 20% of
electricity from non-fossil sources, whether by dangerous nuclear or
by safe wind energy. Electricity corresponds to just 16% of an
average UK household’s carbon dioxide emissions. Only 19% of
electricity is nuclear, so the nuclear contribution to reducing
carbon emissions is at best 4% and probably more like 2% given the
energy used in construction, mining, etc. Air travel represents 34%
of an average household’s carbon emissions. So a 10% rise in air
travel would wipe out all the possible gain of replacing the existing
nuclear plants.
I appreciate that it must be difficult for
government ministers to resist the pressure of the nuclear lobby and
of the scientists and engineers who are employed in the nuclear
industries. Tony Benn who as a minster in the 1960's was in charge of
nuclear power and believed in it then, now says:
“Nuclear
power is certainly not safe as we know from accidents at Windscale
(now renamed Sellafield), from Three Mile Island in America and
Chernobyl in the Ukraine, dangers which the authorities have always
been determined to downplay.
Nor are Britain's civil nuclear power
stations peaceful as for many years, and still possibly today, the
plutonium they produce was sent to fuel the American nuclear weapons
programme, making them into - what were in effect - bomb
factories.
At no stage, as a minister, could I rely on being told
the truth either by the Industry itself, or by my own civil servants
who may or may not have known it themselves.”
Nuclear is
simply in irrelevancy but if we go for it, it will suck in cash like
a financial black hole, crippling investment in renewables. It would
be a return to the bad old days of the CEGB which spent more on
pro-nuclear advertising than its entire renewables research budget.
Your
response:
Government
should make it plain that no new nuclear plants will be built in the
UK and that instead industry should gear up for a massive expansion
of renewable energy with a wartime sense of urgency. They should also
be told to carry out a complete energy renovation of UK buildings.
Starting in 1966 the Gas Board undertook a ten-year national
programme to convert every appliance in the country from town gas to
run on natural gas. Visits were made to 13 million homes and
factories and 34 million individual appliances were converted.
Similarly, In wartime factories rapidly switched to manufacture
completely different products. Now we face a greater threat in
climate change but seem to lack any sense of urgency: the recent
decision to phase out incandescent light bulbs by 2012 is welcome but
5 years to change a light bulb isn't really good enough.
Your
response:
The
case against nuclear power is so strong that the nuclear lobby want
the process for planning permission for new stations to be rushed
through with a minimum of debate. They will argue that we need
nuclear power urgently to tackle climate change. There does not
however seem to be any urgency in promoting any of the other
technologies or energy saving that are safe and easy to introduce. If
you need something urgently, nuclear should be the last option you
should ever consider - remember its past performance: Dungeness B,
took 24 years from start of construction to commercial operation (and
subsequently has failed to produce even half of the expected
power).
Government announcements frequently use the phrase
that Britain must “keep nuclear power open as an option”; my own
member of parliament defended the government’s position with the
comment that the nuclear option should not be dismissed “out of
hand”. I’m left wondering precisely what it would take to
convince ministers that we should dismiss the nuclear option! It’s
a dangerous, expensive, difficult technology which produces materials
for nuclear and dirty bombs, it has no export potential for the UK,
we live in terror of it falling into the wrong hands (and are
currently involved in a war because of this fear), it has already
suffered accidents killing thousands, it contaminates the environment
with waste that will persist for more longer than recorded human
history and is incapable of producing more than a tiny proportion of
the energy the world wants.
If these arguments are not enough,
perhaps ministers could try explaining their plans to groups of young
children. Tell them that the proposed power stations will be worn out
during their lifetimes. That they, their children and grandchildren
will have to dismantle these stations over the following hundred
years and then find holes to bury the waste, which must not be
touched or escape for thousands of years. Describe how every year
that the reactors operate they will produce enough material to make
several nuclear bombs each capable of reducing a whole city to ashes.
Explain that if we choose to build more nuclear plants, other
countries will be more likely to do the same and more likely to
acquire bombs. Tell them that a major accident in any country would
poison much of a continent and that thousands of sheep in Britain are
still unfit to eat because of one such accident that occurred in a
far off country before they were born. Then tell them that some
countries like Sweden have decided to reject nuclear power and are
going to rely on energy saving and renewable sources like wind and
solar. Finally tell them that you’re not going to do that because
you think it costs more and you have better things to spend the money
on.
We worry about getting the best food, health care and
education for our children. We should be proud to invest in the
safest forms of energy for them and future generations.