Faced with persistent cabinet and industry lobbying and professors bearing heavy statistics, MPs have simply caved in
Polly Toynbee, Friday January 11, 2008 The Guardian
Marking the new political year, Gordon Brown promised to take "the difficult long-term decisions, even if at times it may be easier to do simpler or less difficult things". Going nuclear is a big decision and a difficult one, but that doesn't necessarily make it the right one.
In fact, the government chose the easier option - and it's easy to see why. The nuclear cause has been on a roll as Labour and Conservatives have felt the sheer grinding pressure of the nuclear industry, the engineering institutes and a host of powerful interests who have employed useful ex-Labour ministers such as Brian Wilson, Ian McCartney and Richard Caborn, and Bernard Ingham. The pro-nuclear army has been heavily supporting the anti-wind farm brigade. The unions have strongly backed nuclear, because that's where they have some members. They would have few among the 250,000 new jobs created by equivalent spending on renewables and a door-to-door energy efficiency drive.
David Cameron's once healthy nuclear doubts around the time he appointed Zac Goldsmith melted into solid nuclear support yesterday in the Commons, as the Tories - minus Goldsmith, who should resign - have been tied into the same nuclear straitjacket. Back in 1997, the nuclearists were losing the argument, but now they have turned nuclear into the grown-up choice, the one serious men agree is the must-have ingredient in the "energy mix". The rest is tree-hugging.
This must rank as one of the great PR triumphs of all time. What genius masterminded its selling to the very same government that picked up the still rising £5.3bn bill for the gigantic failure of British Energy? The cost of storing nuclear waste and decommissioning decaying stations will be about £70bn. This is like a conned householder buying another new roof from the same cowboy who destroyed the last one.
No voice in cabinet queried this decision - and it's easy to see why. Under heavy bombardment from both sides, it takes time to wade through detailed arguments. How are ordinary politicians (or journalists) to know which group of distinguished professors bearing statistics is right? John Hutton is well-armed with thick briefs, his department ever the nuclear cheerleader. For a member of the cabinet to oppose another minister on a central policy takes nerve, and a confident depth of knowledge. Firefighting in their own departments, who has time to stop and read themselves into the fine print, to detect the spurious from the valid? It's easier to go with the bien pensant view briefed to all ministers and MPs, that, like it or not, anyone who is serious about climate change has to be serious about nuclear. Labour fears looking soft so the politics feel solid, even if the science and economics are an unknowable quagmire. And no nuclear pigeons come home to roost on their watch anyway.
Thus momentous decisions are made. After Iraq, it might be hoped ministers and Conservatives had learned lessons about not always trusting the establishment view. But most people are in the same situation: how can we know? Reading through submissions on both sides, what becomes plain is that no one can know. The experts, too, are guessing, bolstering their already settled views with extreme nuclear optimism or extreme disaster scenarios.
Nuclear power certainly feels safer than it did, with so many reactors around the world and only one deadly accident in the dysfunctional USSR. No one denies that nuclear is better than boiling the planet alive, if that were the choice. But it's not. The politicians had to choose which low-carbon energy would be best and cheapest. In the end they ducked choosing by declaring they would leave it to the market. The hidden hand would sort it all out. Tories and Labour alike swear there will be no subsidy: let nuclear find its own place. It sounds easy, whereas forcing greater energy efficiency is untidy and requires people to do things. Politically, nuclear feels temptingly like a magic wand.
Except for a number of fundamental reasons, it's not. No nuclear power station has ever been built without state subsidy; all were late by an average of six years, and were less productive and vastly more expensive than promised. All need backup. Nothing stopped the market building them until now, except maybe a glance at the only plant to be built in Europe in a decade. In Finland, with vast state subsidy from Finnish and French governments, the reactor is two years late after just two years' building, and £1bn over budget. The industry was waiting for assurances that were indeed embedded in yesterday's announcement: the state will build the deep storage necessary for old and new waste, which the new reactors will be able to use at a certainly subsidised price. It will cost the government £20bn or so.
Will the companies pay the uninsurable full cost of a serious accident? Who pays for further flood defences, since all the sites are by the rising sea? Here's one clause in yesterday's white paper: "In extreme circumstances the government may be called upon to meet the costs of ensuring the protection of the public and the environment." Everyone knows that. The government has baled out every reactor built so far.
EDF, the energy company, said at once it was ready to build. But EDF is owned mainly by the French state. If they ever need a bail-out, or if decommissioning costs far more than the sum set aside, would they ringfence the UK operation so they took the profits for years, leaving the UK, not the French government, to cover any future costs? I asked them yesterday and they said these were details still to be worked out. Presumably EDF thinks they will make a profit - but as part of UK energy planning, they can't be allowed to fail.
Who are nuclear energy's strongest instinctive promoters? Oddly enough, they are mainly on the right - the very same debunkers of all grand projects from the Olympics and the O2 to mighty IT schemes for NHS or identity cards. They tend to be lately converted climate-change deniers, whereas it's been the green thinkers who have proved consistently right about science.
The most serious objection is not safety but "nuclear blight", the probability that government and energy firms' cash, engineers and project management capacity is swept up in this great nuclear South Sea bubble and nothing is left for other renewables. The energy gap kicks in long before even the most wildly optimistic estimates of reactors coming online. Gas will fill the gap, as research money for cheaper and better renewables risks being vaporised in the nuclear mania.
Brown promised an astonishing 40% of electricity will come from renewables by 020. But will it happen? The reactor in Finland only squeaked through its parliament on the promise of huge new investment in other renewables - but nuclear overspend swallowed it up. Remember, Labour's record has been abysmal, letting carbon emissions rise by 2% with renewable energy only generating 2%, the lowest level in the EU.
The danger is that politicians have decided they have taken the "hard decision" and nuclear is "the answer". If a "mix" is needed, the nuclear concrete mixers may grind up the wind, solar, wave and tidal generators that will be needed before the first lightbulb is lit by a new reactor. Meanwhile, the "nuclear answer" deceives the public and delays yet further the necessary great national energy-efficiency drive that politicians continue to avoid.