Turning tides?

Time to get serious.

So nuclear is in the news! Hoorah!
It’s good to see the issues out in public domain again, particularly as the Government has seemed so keen to push its pro-nuke agenda without fair consultation or debate.
It took me about 4 hours yesterday to trawl through the stuff surrounding this one news story, so I’ll try be a bit briefer in summing up my own stance.

It all started in The Independent.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/nuclear-power-yes-please-1629327.html

Would it be wrong to make a joke about taking ‘Green Living’ a little too literally?
Probably.

The article caused such a stir because four of the ‘country’s leading environmentalists’ have come out in favour of nuclear power.
I’ll do a post specifically about the four guys, and others that have crossed over, soon, for now though here’s some summation and analysis. Deep Breath!
The fact that it’s being classed as front page material simply because these guys have done a U-turn seems a bit odd, as the paper acknowledged afterwards –

“Is it a big deal that the Green have changed?
Yes and no. Symbolically it is hugely important. Plans for new reactors are still expected to raise hackles but the Green movement’s acknowledgement of nuclear as the lesser of two evils will take away some of the sting. Ironically, it is the environmental agenda that made the economics of commercial nuclear expansion work.”

This little paragraph speaks volumes.
Firstly, please don’t equate these four to an entire movement; there are loads of people who have examined the facts and feel that nuclear is no more required than it ever was, probably even less. And in a pedantic sense, who the fuck is ‘the Green’… and what are ‘hackles’? You’d hope for a slighter higher degree of journalism when questioning issues as complicated as nuclear power.

Now, as Alanis Morisette failed to teach us, irony is a strange beast-

‘Like rain on your wedding day?’

That’s not irony guys! It’s just a damn shame.
So is the fact that four men can spend there lives trying to convince people about the dangers of global warming, staring at C02 figures that fill them with such fear, such desperation, that they feel propelled to a middle ground of doing something, anything, in order to see some kind of change.

Economics is essentially the study of confidence and fear- as we enter a period of fear after 10 years of confidence; people are more malleable to change. And so the environmental movement’s biggest weakness becomes clear-
We’ve distilled a fear of global warming, without sufficiently offering hopeful alternatives… I mean how much of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ was about the future?
So there is fear- environmental and economic.
Nuclear science deals in the ‘future’, it sells itself as hope, clearly these four bought into that.

‘A free ride when you’re already late?’

Strangely, this other nugget of Morrisette explains pretty well how the four environmentalists are selling nuclear.
Essentially their main argument seems to be that Britain should be including nuclear power in plans for our future, along with renewables.
At first this seems almost reasonable. Diversity can only be a good thing right?
Well, perhaps not.
These guys know all too well that this has not been a level playing field.
Nuclear power has had such huge swathes of funding over the years, completely dwarfing money put into renewables. It aint free, that’s for sure. There is also no doubt that the two are competing for a similar sector, that for most of the big businesses it’s a choice between them, rather than investment in both, which with money stretched would no doubt equate to less energy per £ of research and development. So why should we continue to believe in something that can only provide 4% emission cuts by 2025, and in no way deal with the 85% of fossil fuel usage which is NOT energy based. Why should we let these companies and politicians sideline renewables into nothing more than a nice photo on a website, a token gesture?
Well, it seems to me that we shouldn’t.

Nuclear will not solve climate change.

Yet this is the argument these guys have found themselves behind, whether purposely or not.

Beyond that, I’d argue that nuclear can’t even compete regardless of our warming atmosphere. Put simply, the economics of commercial nuclear expansion have never worked and will never work.
The current EPR (European Pressurised Reactor) model being built in Finland is at least £1 Billion over budget and around 3 years behind schedule- Areva, the designers of the EPR, have seen a loss in profit of over 20% due to the plant in Finland.
Meanwhile EDF announced a 20% increase in costs for its third generation EPRs at Flamanville, France. The company is pushing flat out to have this flagship reactor online by 2012, so the increase reflects higher investment after the ASN (French Nuclear Safety Authority) temporarily shut the site down last year, after just 6 months building, due to safety worries.
These are the companies, the French-state backed companies, which will be building our new generation of nuclear power plants.

Our last build in Britain came ten years ago after Margaret Thatcher outlined a similarly pro-nuke plan to Brown’s; for 10 new plants. Of course only one was built, at twice the estimated cost.
If (as is so often woefully, falsely, portrayed) the argument here is Coal VS Nuclear, you’d expect Thatcher of all people to plough on into a nuclear dawn! But it didn’t make economic sense, the costs were too high, the delivery of results too late.

Yet, as The Independent states- ‘Symbolically’ coming out in favour of nuclear power looks decisive, never mind if such statements never reach fruition.

If you can name me one nuclear power build in the history of the planet that hasn’t gone over budget or over deadline I’ll be mightily impressed.
They always have, they still are, they always will.

Things haven’t changed.

Proliferation of weapons, huge decommissioning and construction costs, unfair tax-payer subsidies, potential accidents, uranium mining, transportation, terrorism, cancer…

these are the eternal problems of nuclear power.
Nuclear had its chance, renewables deserve a real one.

To let fear over global warming transport us all into a catastrophic reliance on both uranium and oil would be a massive mistake.
To miss this opportunity to put our faith in tested, diverse means of renewable energy, rather than another generation of generators which do not live up to their hyperbole but do swallow enormous amounts of much needed cash, would be to undermine decades of hard work by the environmental movement.

The future doesn’t have to be nuclear and there are still plenty of environmentalists who stand by this, not out of dogmatic ‘faith’, but out of hope in far cleaner, local, accountable and renewable energy.