Nuclear power

As former Greenpeace and Green activists begin to break ranks and support New Labour’s calls for a new generation of nuclear power plants, Iain MacLeod argues that a serious socialist strategy for serious investment in renewables is the real answer, and that the left needs to up its game on the renewables vs nuclear argument.

Nuclear fission power already delivers less energy globally than renewable energy, the safety risks it imposes are known the world over and it has repeatedly been proven to be ineffective financially, yet work still needs to be done to see its support diminished.

While the UK Government is more than content to allow the nation to go down the blind alley of nuclear, former self-proclaimed adversaries of atomic energy have also recently backtracked and committed treason on the nuclear message.

This has propelled the anti-nuclear stance to greater significance. Nuclear power is not needed; the public do not want it and it unless there is a reversal we run the risk of leaving an even worse legacy behind for generations of the future to deal with.

If we spent the same time and money on public sector wave, wind and tidal energy alternatives we would be able to come up with effective energy sources that do not accelerate global warming while driving down fuel costs and enhancing the economy and job opportunities across the country.

Because the system controlling energy has been designed to put profits of a select few before the needs of the majority a dramatic transformation of the system is needed more than ever.

Nuclear energy will keep the British public reliant on private firms who can charge what they like while driving more people into fuel poverty. Without advancement in the development of green energy, we will be forced to pander to the private nuclear firms, remain manacled to the Middle East for oil, subservient to the Russians for gas or desperate for American uranium.

Just last year Gordon Brown said the UK needs to increase its nuclear power capacity and raised the real prospect of plants being built in several new locations. He said it was time to be "more ambitious" for nuclear plans. Downing Street sources said plans could involve expanding existing nuclear power stations or building plants on new sites.

The current government’s position on nuclear energy has become farcical over the last decade. A White Paper on energy, released in 2003, described nuclear power as an "unattractive option" and included no plans to replace existing reactors when they closed. Friends of the Earth even predicted the policy sounded "the death knell" for nuclear power in Britain.

Then, another White paper, in January 2008, demonstrated a complete U-turn when it described nuclear power as safe, low carbon, affordable and dependable.

The Prime Minister will set "no upper limit" on the number of nuclear plants that will be built by private companies. This comes despite false promises earlier in the decade that reliance on nuclear power would be phased out.

Labour’s treachery towards the nuclear message is not surprising - it is just one of many short-term policies being used to boost private sector profits. But the situation has become more pressing in recent months with a number of former high-profile opponents of nuclear power performing a reversal and adding their support to atomic energy.

Included within a group of prominent backtrackers is Stephen Tindale, a former director of Greenpeace no less.

Joining former nuclear adversary Tindale is Lord Chris Smith of Finsbury, the chairman of the Environment Agency, Mark Lynas, author of the Royal Society’s science book of the year, and Chris Goodall, a Green Party activist and prospective parliamentary candidate.

Tindale, who ran Greenpeace for five years until he resigned in 2005, has taken a vehemently anti-nuclear stance throughout his career as an environmentalist. “My position was necessarily that nuclear power was wrong, partly for the pollution and nuclear waste reasons but primarily because of the risk of proliferation of nuclear weapons,” he said in February.

“My change of mind wasn’t sudden, but gradual over the past four years. But the key moment when I thought that we needed to be extremely serious was when it was reported that the permafrost in Siberia was melting massively, giving up methane, which is a very serious problem for the world.

“It was kind of like a religious conversion. Being anti-nuclear was an essential part of being an environmentalist for a long time but now that I’m talking to a number of environmentalists about this, it’s actually quite widespread this view that nuclear power is not ideal but it’s better than climate change.”

Tindale’s approach, sadly, only seems to mirror the short-term, defeatist and reckless attitude being demonstrated by the Labour regime. In a time of crisis, which this certainly is, it is not enough to take the easiest option, but a combative and bold approach is needed more than ever.

Just days after Tindale’s comments, an investigation by The Independent revealed new nuclear reactors planned for Britain will produce many times more radiation than previous plants.

The exposure – based on information buried deep in documents produced by the nuclear industry itself – calls into doubt repeated assertions, accepted without question by New Labour, that the new European Pressurised Reactors (EPRs) will be safer than the old atomic power stations they replace.

Instead the information suggests that a reactor or nuclear waste accident, although less likely to happen, could have even more devastating consequences in future.

Data in one report, produced by French company EDF, suggests new reactors would produce four times as much radioactive bromine, rubidium, iodine and caesium as a present-day reactor.

David JC MacKay, author of Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air, highlighted one example.

He said: “The safety of nuclear operations in Britain remains a concern. The THORP reprocessing facility at Sellafield, built in 1994 at a cost of £1.8 billion, had a growing leak from a broken pipe from August 2004 to April 2005.

“Over eight months, the leak let 85,000 litres of uranium-rich fluid flow into a sump which was equipped with safety systems that were designed to detect immediately any leak of as little as 15,000 litres. But the leak went undetected because the operators hadn’t completed the checks that ensured the safety systems were working; and the operators were in the habit of ignoring safety alarms anyway.”

He added: “If we let private companies build new reactors, how can we ensure that higher safety standards are adhered to? I don’t know.”

But the disadvantages of nuclear fission go well beyond the safety implications.

Mark Diesendorf, of the Institute of Environmental Studies at the University of New South Wales, argues against the use of nuclear power in his paper The Base-Load Fallacy.

Referring to the use of nuclear power, he writes: “They produce little pollution during normal operation, but much pollution (including carbon dioxide emissions) from mining, enrichment, plant construction and decommissioning, reprocessing and waste management. They also increase the risks of proliferation of nuclear weapons and have the capacity for rare but catastrophic accidents.”

He adds: “There is no technical reason to stop renewable energy from supplying 100 per cent of grid electricity. The system could be just as reliable as the dirty, fossil-fuelled system that it replaces.”

The problem of radioactive waste is still an unsolved one. The waste from nuclear energy is extremely dangerous and it has to be carefully looked after for several thousand years - 10,000 years according to United States Environmental Protection Agency standards. Several environmental groups have already said taxpayers will be left with a huge clean-up bill after the new plants are decommissioned, pointing to the £73billion cost of phasing out the existing 10 reactors.

All except one of them – Sizewell B – will shut down over the next 15 years. It is only right that the money is spent on properly decommissioning the plants that were opened decades ago, however, what could never be justified is going down the same road again and repeating the same mistakes – inevitable if the government’s proposals go ahead.

One of the major inaccuracies that has been put forward by the recently converted pro-nuclear lobby is that plants will limit climate change and although not ideal, is better than the alternative. This is not the case, however. It takes longer than 10 years to plan, build and start operating a reactor.

And as Andrew Simms, of the New Economics Foundation, highlighted when interviewed by the BBC, nuclear power is also restricted by a time limit.

He said: “Nuclear also has a dirty little secret. Startlingly there is only a few decades left of the proven high-grade uranium ore it needs for fuel. It’s also far less climate-friendly than claimed. Once low-grade ore is used, costs go up and all the energy used from mining to decommissioning means it can lead to more carbon emissions than fossil fuel-powered gas generators.”

By the time Brown’s new generation of stations are ready to start operating significant damage will have been done to the environment. The number of renewable projects that could have been financed, staffed and in operation in such a timeframe could already be well on the way to cutting back harmful emissions.

Even the right-wing economists backing the roll-out of more nuclear reactors are unable to support their claims on a financial basis. A single nuclear power station costs more than £2billion to build – and also an average of £5.3billion to clean-up at the end of its life. Taxpayers in the UK are already committed to a bill of around £60billion for cleaning up existing sites. A Cabinet Office report in 2002 revealed that nuclear power would cost significantly more per unit of electricity generated than either on-shore or off-shore wind electricity.

Even Labour MP Alan Whitehead, a former member of the government’s select committee on environment, said: “The nuclear option is probably the worst one we might consider, even if we analyse it on finance alone.” And fellow Labour MP Michael Meacher, a former environment minister under the Blair government, said: “I think we need nuclear like a hole in the head.”

And earlier this month, (April) the government suffered even more embarrassment at the spiralling costs of nuclear.

The mixed-oxide (Mox) plant at Sellafield, which was approved by the government despite concerns over its cost, was supposed to produce 120 tons of fuel a year and return a profit of £200million in its lifetime.

However, figures released to parliament by the government show that it has produced just 6.3 tons of fuel in seven years and racked up £626 million of operating costs. It also cost £637million in construction and commission costs.

It is also the case that very few jobs are created by nuclear power stations. At a time when the global recession is starting to bite, the government should not be looking at spending such huge sums of money on costly schemes which do not attract many jobs, cost a fortune to set up and are destroying the planet. Sticking with the financial side of things, the government will inevitably have to shell out huge sums of money in subsidies to the private firms who will operate nuclear power plants. If this money was invested instead in renewable energy it would drive down the cost of new technologies and speed up the implementation of alternative energy sources.

The Green revolution must gather momentum around the world and in the UK to stop the government regurgitating the environmentally-unfriendly, costly, ineffective, unsafe and dangerous mistakes of the past. Under the Labour Party and many other Western governments, the piecemeal approach has already wasted too much time and resources.

Scotland has already been at the forefront of some of the most pioneering renewable creations, trials and discoveries, but has been hampered by the uncommitted and unsystematic approach of Westminster leaders. Frustratingly, the resources needed to make the change in Britain and Scotland surrounds us – there is no excuse for not utilising them to the full extent. For example, the UK has, in the form of wind power, the largest renewable energy resource in Europe.

The matter of nuclear power has also thrown up important issues regarding Scottish independence. Since the SNP came to power it has signalled no desire to build new plants – a decision which has been attacked, belittled and undermined by Westminster. Earlier this year Labour sent its puppet in Scotland Jim Murphy to an Edinburgh conference where he tried to earn some extra Brownie points by repeating the PM’s assault on plans to reject a new generation of nuclear plants. Murphy declared that "Scottish self-reliance without new nuclear generation is imaginary."

No other country in the world with a similar population to Scotland has a better opportunity to be nuclear free – a factor that if matched with the necessary desire can consign Murphy and his ignorant, short-termist views to the political scrapheap.

Murphy’s bosses at Westminster have throughout this decade used, with the help of the mainstream media, almost any opportunity to utilise the threat of terrorism to exploit a state of fear and panic within communities. However they have been quick to play down the possibility of nuclear plants being used as terrorist targets, despite overwhelming evidence suggesting it has at the very least been considered by groups.

As Greenpeace has observed: “Building more nuclear power stations will dramatically increase the risk of a catastrophic terrorist attack, which could claim millions of lives. A shocking dossier of expert evidence has shown how a terrorist strike, targeting dangerous radioactive waste held at the Sellafield nuclear facility in Cumbria, could kill over two million people.”

It is essential that the free-market vehicle for pushing through change is abandoned – an issue of this size and importance will not be addresses while the capitalist powers use it to enhance profit margins. The concern cannot be diluted by those that want to exploit it on an economic basis.

When the US and UK waged its illegal war on Iraq leaders of both countries insisted cost could not be allowed to get in the way of defeating the threat. With climate change, there is a genuine threat that we know is deepening day-by-day. It is for this reason the UK must take ‘whatever steps are necessary’ to address the issue. Renewable alternatives have been tested and proven to work – all that is needed is the will.

The Scottish and Westminster governments should ditch strategies of trying to attract large private firms and construction companies with the prospect of lucrative returns on investment and establish a publicly-owned corporation which would reinvest money into the sector to develop further technologies and help us reach our environmental targets.

Scotland has a major problem with fuel poverty – a direct result of having a privatised system that allows suppliers to charge what they like. Over the last winter 850,000 Scottish household were deemed to be in fuel poverty. Across Britain five million households suffer the same problem – a situation made worse by the fact that the Fuel Poverty Bill, which hoped to tackle the problem by assisting those most vulnerable, failed when it came before Westminster in March because too few MPs turned up to vote on it.

The bill, which proposed to make homes more energy-efficient and introduce lower prices for vulnerable households, needed to gain 100 votes from ministers, but only managed to achieve 91 votes – 89 in support. The utter contempt shown by MPs towards such an important issue demonstrates how important change is. Participating in a government that allows energy companies to charge what they wish, consigning millions into fuel poverty and resulting in the deaths of thousands of others, Labour MPs have again shown a distinct lack of interest in how energy matters impact citizens and must be made to pay the penalty for such betrayal.

Those around the globe who genuinely want to see environmental change must demand immediate implementation of green energy projects. As well as saving energy, thousands of people can be put back into work in operating renewable projects and upgrading the homes we live in.

Instead of subsidising the huge capitalist companies to pollute the world even more, we should be bringing Scottish and UK companies into public ownership to use their talents and resources to create the technology to run green power for solar, wind and tidal energy.

Under the capitalist system that governs our lives, with its vested corporate and military industrial complex interests, the dangerous, short-termist and uneconomic pursuit of nuclear power will continue. The left in Scotland and internationally must put the green, renewable alternative – led by publicly owned and democratically accountable energy companies as part of a strategic national and international plan – to the fore of its campaigning work