Nuclear prejudice will cost our nation heavily

Published on Sunday 18 July 2010 13:21

'Alex Salmond destroys 10,000 Scottish jobs." Not a headline you'll have read recently, but one you should have because the First Minister's utterly irrational prejudice against nuclear power is directing a construction boom to England.

Last week Education Secretary Michael Gove cancelled the 55 billion Building Schools for the Future programme - a big blow to local communities and construction companies.

Gloom on the jobs front was lifted in some areas by the announcement by electricity giant EDF that they would build a new nuclear reactor at Hinckley Point in Somerset. The 500 million project will generate 5,000 jobs - at least half of these drawn from local labour. The coming boom in new nuclear is one that - tragically - Scotland is being excluded from, and all because of the Scottish Government.

This is an especially bitter blow for a nation that from Dounreay to Torness has been a leader in nuclear power, and which through British Energy - now part of EDF - has a major business stake in the industry. And nuclear is the major source of electricity in Scotland - at lunchtime today over half the electricity used in Scottish homes and businesses will come from nuclear plants.

But while happy to have EDF in East Kilbride, Scottish ministers have made it clear that they will use their powers to block a Torness B or a Hunterston C.

Now, the Scottish Government's position is plainly unlawful - no minister can block a planning development just because they don't like it. In fact, planning is quasi-judicial and ministers by their prejudicial public statements have almost certainly made it impossible for them to be impartial, so would lose any Judicial Reviews.

But the point is that no business will come where it isn't wanted, so the two new nuclear power stations that Scotland could expect will go to England. This isn't just a tragedy for North Ayrshire and East Lothian, it is the wrong energy policy in environmental and economic terms.

First of all, if we are serious about tackling climate change then nuclear has to be part of the energy mix. It may not seem like it, but wind does not blow consistently so wind power cannot provide the baseload - the always on - electricity that nuclear can.

It is all very well to boast that Scotland has huge amounts of wind power connected to the grid. It only runs a third of the time and it can't cope with surges of demand - like the early-morning cuppa.

Coal is a polluting source of baseload - and Scotland's coal-fired stations only have a limited life before EU regulations close them. And gas is a fossil fuel - part of the problem, not the solution. There must, and will, be a future for clean coal, but the US Department of Energy - which has huge amounts of capital, political and financial, invested in clean coal - doesn't see that being of real scale till nearly 2030. If we need carbon-neutral, baseload electricity then nuclear is the only game in town.

Secondly, there are real and considerable environmental questions about onshore wind. The noise and visual impact of windmills do have an effect on the quality of life of local communities. It's all very well to call people NIMBYs, but it is their backyard and they have some rights to quiet enjoyment.

The practicalities are that with Scotland's huge and remote rural hinterland, substantial parts of the country will - on planning grounds - be unusable for windpower. And there should be honesty about the amount of land that wind farms need to occupy to generate substantial amounts of electricity.

Professor David MacKay, Chief Scientific Adviser to the Department of Energy and Climate Change has produced "Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air" (www.withouthotair.com), a fact-based guide to the energy challenge.

In it he calculates that the feasible maximum for wind farms in the UK is to occupy 10 per cent of the land (and a huge amount of this would be in Scotland (to put that into perspective he calculates that is equivalent to "50 time the entire wind hardware of Denmark; seven times all the wind farms of Germany; and double the entire fleet of all wind turbines in the world".

Ah, but you're forgetting offshore wind, the renewable industry will argue. But that runs straight into the third objection - sheer cost. It is not widely discussed, but on purely economic grounds wind-generated electricity would not get off the ground. It is simply far too expensive.

There is only a thriving business in Britain because it is massively subsidised. By who? By you and me through our electricity bills. Electricity companies have to buy a certain amount of high-priced renewable energy and pass the costs on to consumers.

This only works because it's a concealed cost and because we don't have to pay for 100 per cent of our energy to be produced in this way.

The Royal Society of Edinburgh's excellent Inquiry into Energy Issues for Scotland estimated that onshore wind costs 50 per cent more than nuclear and that offshore is double the cost.

It is inconceivable that most people would rather pay twice as much for electricity to avoid using the nuclear power which has so safely and efficiently supplied Scotland for years.

This brings me to the final objection to nuclear power - the problem of waste. This issue is easily dismissed. Even if we stopped nuclear power tomorrow there's existing waste - 90 per cent of it from the nuclear weapons programme in the Fifties.

Current nuclear power stations produce a tiny amount of waste; according to Professor MacKay it's the equivalent of the 70cl (or a bottle of wine) per person in the UK every year. And the next generation will produce less. So we are adding very little to our stockpiles.

But the strongest counter-argument is this: the arguments about nuclear waste are about future hypothetical risk. But we are living today with the impacts of fossil fuel waste - climate change. Burning coal, gas and oil have emitted the carbon that has raised (and is raising) temperatures dangerously high with costs to millions of lives.

It's cheap, it's safe, it's carbon-neutral. It generates baseload, and creates jobs. It provides energy security. Time to say "Nuclear power - yes, please." •John McTernan is a former special adviser to Jim Murphy in the Scotland Office