This is a guest post by Pete Roche, editor of the No2nuclearpower website.
The UK Government’s consultation on the Future of Nuclear Power – forced on to it by a successful legal action brought by Greenpeace – ended on Wednesday 10th October. By coincidence, Wednesday was also the 50th anniversary of Britain’s worst nuclear accident when the reactor core at Windscale caught fire sending a plume of radioactive material across the country. Five decades ago secrecy and cover-ups did nothing to reassure those with growing doubts about the risks of nuclear technology. Today, the closed consultation has carried on the tradition of wilfully misleading the public.
Britain’s leading environmental groups withdrew from the consultation prior to 8th September when a series of consultation workshops, organised by Opinion Leader Research (OLR), were held in eight cities around the UK with 1,100 member of the public who were asked to assess the case for and against nuclear power and then take a vote. The environment groups said the government had failed to fairly reflect the arguments presented at the meetings, and was distorting the evidence. Independently, 20 senior academics agreed that participants were misled.
An inconvenient truth about nuclear – that it can only make a small contribution to reducing the UK’s overall CO2 emissions – was not mentioned. The information given to the public was biased and incomplete. The Government’s intention was clear – provide very limited, biased information in order to lead the participants to a predetermined conclusion. Greenpeace has made a formal complaint to the Market Research Standards Council about the conduct by Opinion Leader Research.
Nuclear power can, at best, only make a very minimal contribution to reducing carbon emissions, and it won’t be able to start making that contribution until around 2020 at the earliest – not soon enough to make it worth the extra risk, and experience suggests there will be delays and cost overruns. The new reactor programme could stall without making sufficient carbon savings, but too late for alternative strategies to be introduced. At worst carbon emissions from the nuclear life cycle could begin to climb, as lower and lower grades of uranium are mined to feed its insatiable appetite.
Focussing on a new reactor programme risks diverting attention and resources from the urgent programmes which we should be implementing now in order to effectively tackle climate change – renewable energy and energy efficiency. The UK Government’s Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) points out that, even with a doubling of UK nuclear capacity, cuts in carbon emissions of at least 50% would still be needed from other measures if the UK is to meet its climate targets for 2050. So it is important that our capacity to implement other carbon abatement measures is not damaged by a decision to go ahead with new reactors. But a new reactor programme is likely to fatally undermine alternative carbon abatement strategies. It will send all the wrong signals to consumers and businesses, implying that a major technological fix is all that’s required, weakening the urgent action needed on energy efficiency.
We need to look at the problem of carbon emissions more holistically. Nuclear power can only supply electricity, so fails to address carbon emissions from heat and transport. For example, the UK Government’s aviation policy has given the industry permission to produce up to three times the volume of carbon emissions by 2030 than might be avoided by replacing the UK’s nuclear power stations. A rethink of aviation policy would be a far more effective way to tackle climate change.
Many advocates of nuclear power say that, because climate change is serious we need to promote renewables, energy efficiency and nuclear power. This suggests we have infinite sources of finance to spend on energy projects, which is obviously nonsense. We have scarce resources, and because of the seriousness of climate change, we need to maximize carbon reductions for every pound spent. Investment in new reactors will, in effect, worsen climate change because each dollar we spend is buying less solution than it would do if we were to spend it on energy efficiency measures, which can be up to seven times more cost effective than nuclear power. In short, investing in expensive nuclear power is just about the worst possible thing we could do.
For more on the Consultation Sham – see Energy Review Update No.15
Nuclear Power is Not the Answer to Climate Change by Pete Roche, can be found here.