Canadian expert view of British State's Nuclear Ventures, Ooooops.....
The British Nuclear Industry:Status and Prospects
Centre for International Governance Innovation (Canada)
January 2009
www.cigionline.org
Concerns about security of supply and climate change frame the UK debate, and while the government has concluded that new nuclear build is a major part of any solution, public opinion remains deeply divided - not least because of the legacy of costly and inefficient former UK nuclear projects. This paper explores the status and prospects of the British nuclear industry, including its history, UK energy strategy and the evolving regulatory framework, and discusses the continuing concerns surrounding the prospective new nuclear build in the UK.
Concluding Paragraphs ..........
At every turn in the 2008 White Paper on Nuclear Power, the concerns that were raised during the consultation are eventually dismissed, with the balance of the argument always resting on the government’s side. It is hard not to see the whole consultation as a massive public relations exercise created to fit the policy – an “exercise in managed consent” as one Scottish critic put it. In a detailed analysis of the form and function of the nuclear consultation, another group of nuclear experts concluded:
To access true public opinion about such a high-stakes issue,
the public consultation should have been clear, integrated,
independent, and conducted over a long enough time-frame.
Failure to do so has left the government vulnerable to legal
challenge and may lead to hostility and mistrust of any
future energy policy decision (Dorfman, 2008: 6).
Instead, the mantra throughout the consultation was that new nuclear power stations could make a positive contribution to maintaining a diverse energy mix in the UK and no contradictory evidence was allowed to stand in the way of this “fact.” More recently, the extravagant claims by ministers that new nuclear power stations will generate not only the energy the UK needs, but also 100,000 new jobs have emerged. But there are few details as to when and how these jobs will be created, and where they will be located (most could be in France rather than the UK, for example, were a French reactor design to be chosen).
Rather than a “gateway to a new nuclear renaissance across Europe,” the decision to build a new generation of nuclear power stations seems likely once again to take the British economy down a costly technological cul-de-sac. The problematic history of nuclear power in the UK suggests that a much more prudent path would see a stronger focus on delivering more sustainable methods of generating electricity, and on absolute reductions in UK energy demand, along the lines of what is being proposed in Scotland. A more radical option would have seen Ministers seek to ensure energy security by reducing demand to a level that could be met fully by renewable energy sources. Diversity could have been obtained within the renewable energy mix by including new imported sources (such as geothermal energy from Iceland and concentrating solar energy from North Africa) as well as promoting innovative indigenous projects such as a Severn Barrage and other projects for tidal power and wave energy.
As David Edgerton (2008: xiii) argues, alternatives exist for nearly all technologies. However it seems likely that these renewable technologies will be crowded out (as they were in the past), by the obsession with nuclear power. Malcolm Wicks, the UK energy minister, while acknowledging only recently that Britain needs a “revolution” in green technologies, continues to insist that the country is showing “leadership” in the area. The facts, however, show Britain as the third worst in the EU for the use of renewables. By pressing the green button on a nuclear revival, the UK government may once again be unwittingly raising the stop sign on viable alternatives.
Er... and what about the Uranium?
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