Oct 11th 2007 , rom The Economist print editio
The shadow of an old accident haunts Britain's nuclear revival
THIS is a big week in the government's attempt to rehabilitate nuclear energy. Eight months after a court ruled that its first public consultation on whether to build more reactors had been misleading and unfair, its second attempt finished on October 10th. For a government with (until recently) a reputation for slick public relations, that date looks ill-judged. For it also marks the 50th anniversary of a fire at the Windscale nuclear reactor in Cumbria that was, until Three Mile Island in 1979, the world's worst atomic accident (the Chernobyl explosion in 1986 dwarfs both).
The fire broke out during a maintenance operation and burned for over 40 hours before engineers realised what was happening. At its height, 11 tonnes of uranium fuel was burning at temperatures of up to 1,300 degrees Celsius. A plume of radioactive smoke drifted south towards London, and east over Norway and Belgium. The fire was put out by drenching the reactor's core with water, a risky operation that could have caused a hydrogen explosion. The prime minister, Harold Macmillan, ordered the disaster hushed up.
Experts insist that a repeat of the Windscale accident is extremely unlikely. The heat build-up that sparked the fire was caused by poor knowledge of reactor physics, which are much better understood today. The reactor itself—designed to produce plutonium for Britain's bombs—was full of flammable material and built with few of the safety features that modern power stations are laden with. Simon Taylor, an economist at Cambridge University's business school, argues that Windscale was good for Britain's nuclear industry, since it focused minds on safety.
Such reassurances cut little ice with the public. According to Ipsos MORI, a polling outfit, public support for nuclear energy has risen over the past six years (see chart). More Britons now support nuclear power than oppose it. But despite official arguments about nuclear power's low-carbon nature and potential contribution to more secure electricity supplies, the rise in its popularity has hardly been dramatic. Support peaked in 2005 and has fallen since then, except among MPs—many of whom will merely be toeing the line of a government keen to see new plants built.
Experts and pressure groups have tended to worry more in recent years about the cost of building reactors and how to dispose of the waste they generate than about safety risks, says Mr Taylor. But the public has very different priorities. While 55% of respondents cited waste disposal as a problem with nuclear power, 48% worried about a radiation leak and 46% about a nuclear accident. Only 13% cared about the potential cost.
Environmental groups have dismissed the government's new consultation, arguing that its aim is to sell a policy that has already been decided upon rather than genuinely to canvass voters' views. Yet greens may have little to fear. The polls reveal a striking and pervasive public distrust of official information about nuclear power. Only scientists employed by universities, a few television-news programmes and environmental groups are trusted to tell the truth. Government scientists and cabinet ministers are widely disbelieved. The most distrusted figure of all is Gordon Brown himself, although the polling was conducted before he became prime minister. Since official sources have so little credibility, any attempt to sell nuclear energy to the public may end up sharpening people's doubts.