While reading the local paper last night, I came across a
small article nestling close to the fold of a page. The headline read: A Warning Over Energy Shortfall. The article went on to say that Britain is
facing the rising risk of an energy shortfall within three years. The energy regulator, Ofgem, said that
energy supplies were being hit by the closure of ageing coal, oil-fired and
nuclear power stations and being hit at the same time by tough European Union
environmental laws.
The report predicted that the amount of spare capacity in
the UK could plunge from the current 14% to just 4% in 2015, leaving the UK at
risk of significant shortfalls. This is sobering stuff and brings the crisis
home to people in their own living rooms – or wherever they like to read their
newspaper. How can the situation have
become so desperate? Well, first of all
it stems from the government’s wilfully blind obsession with nuclear power and
its failure to engage with renewable energy in a purposeful way. Secondly,
having put most of its eggs in a nuclear basket, it now has to watch as one by
one members of the consortia who were to build Britain’s new nuclear power
stations are pulling out due to ever rising costs. The government has bent over
backwards to accommodate the nuclear industry. At present it is trying to
concoct an energy bill that will give aspiring nuclear plant builders big
enough returns to overcome their fears.
However, it has promised that this should not involve any public subsidy
at all and will be held to this by both the political opposition and the
public. Yet no nuclear power station
has ever been built without public subsidy – and everyone knows this, so we’re
all in ‘never never’ land, but dare not admit it.
And it is not just the cost of the new nuclear power
stations. On 4th October, the European Commission published the
results of its “stress tests” on all nuclear reactors following the Fukushima
disaster, revealing hundreds of defects. Practically all of the 134 nuclear
reactors in the European Union – including Sizewell B in Suffolk - need safety
improvements at a cost of up to £20 billion, a bill that is likely to be passed
on to the consumer in higher electricity prices. Whoever said that nuclear electricity would be “too cheap to
meter”?
Where will all this money go? I would like to quote a paragraph from “This is Money” on 7th
October 2012, which answers that question
: “A set of negotiations that have the ability to swipe tens of
billions out of the public purse and into private coffers. Chinese investors
may be about to pick up part of the tab for building some of our new nuclear
power stations, but this is not out of the goodness of their hearts. French
energy group, EdF, in partnership with British Gas owner Centrica, has been
embroiled in long negotiations with the Government over what will effectively
be a subsidy to help them cover the huge building costs of these new
generators. The Government is worried that unless we get these plants built –
and quickly – there is a real chance that the lights will go out. But some of the numbers now being talked
about in terms of price guarantees for the energy giants are astronomical. The highly regarded Supporters of Nuclear
Energy group has calculated that, after building costs have been paid, the
firms will coin a cool £4 billion a year in profits. And these power stations are expected to run for 50 years or so. That is an awful lot of our money likely to
find its way into the pockets of EdF and Centrica. Certainly the Government’s negotiating position is not
strong. Despite a belief that, should
push come to shove, we could throw up a load of gas-fired power stations to
cover any gap, there is still a conviction in Whitehall that we will be in
severe trouble unless these nuclear plants are built.”
To go back to the little notice in our local paper –
everyone seems to have forgotten that when Tony Blair suddenly changed his mind
in 2005 and said we must have more nuclear power, the reason he gave was that
unless we did, we could face exactly the shortage that our local paper has
suddenly discovered for us – the retirement of ageing coal and nuclear power
plants and personnel. Perhaps the
paper has also forgotten that at the time many people with foresight were
saying: “Yes – you’d better get on and encourage benign renewables too, because
unless you do there will be nothing except carbon profligate gas to replace
those ageing stations.”
On the subject of ageing reactors and personnel, a
specialist engineer who worked at Hinkley Point nuclear power station for
almost thirty years recently slammed the nuclear industry’s approach to safety
and predicted that a Fukushima-type disaster in the UK was “almost inevitable”. Speaking at a rally organised to oppose the
construction of a new mega-reactor at the Somerset power station, Peter Smith
said “Over the years, I became more and more aware of the dangers and the dark
side of nuclear power”. Smith, who was
head of the electrical and instrumentation section at Hinkley before he
retired, said he had seen corner-cutting from the design stage onwards. At
Hinkley, major safety systems were omitted and others only implemented after
accidents. He concluded that human
error makes it impossible for nuclear power to be 100% safe.
Commenting on EdF Energy’s bid to build a new EPR reactor at
Hinkley, Smith added: “The nuclear industry suffers from the delusion that
nuclear power is safe.” And he raised the issue of the lack of nuclear engineering
expertise in the nuclear industry: “The reason there was never a major incident
at Hinkley was because there were experts like me who knew the systems inside
out. These experts are now retiring or moving to other sectors. If you combine
this brain drain with increasing commercial pressures and old reactors being
pushed to perform beyond their intended lifespan, you’re creating a recipe for
disaster.”
Neither Blair nor Cameron have done anything but try to
fiddle a political way around the crisis – and it is left to the local Eastern
Daily Press to play the role of Macbeth’s witches and warn us all of doom.
But there is something the government could do – and should
have done by now. They could invoke the “war time spirit” and engage people
with a vision of helping get Britain through this energy crisis. The government
could promote and lead a wholehearted change of attitude towards selfishness
and greed – including an end to the squandering of electricity as happens
everywhere at present. This would be a
more honest way of going on – instead of acting like Tony Blair and refusing to
even consider telling people to do anything that might affect their life-styles
(his reported response to a suggestion to ask people to switch to low energy
light bulbs!)
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