The Economics of Energy: Face the Facts. The Future Must Be Nuclear: Renewables Won't Deliver. Government Must Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Nuclear Power, Argues Former Energy Minister Brian Wilson

Aug 23 - Observer, The; London (UK)

THE CASE for resuming a nuclear energy programme in the UK is so strong that the time is ripe to take the argument head-on. As the citizens of Cornwall and Perthshire last week surveyed the consequences of climatic mayhem, they might also have been invited to form views on whether it really makes sense to abandon our only existing significant source of carbon-free energy.

This is a leap in thinking that distinguished scientists are already taking - from Sir David King, chief scientific adviser to the government, to James Lovelock, guru of Gaia and arch- environmentalist. Both started out from an anti-nuclear bias but, on the basis of empirical scientific evidence, arrived at the same conclusion. In the age of global warming, opposition to nuclear power is a cop-out rather than a rational or responsible position.

The Labour government has sought to reconcile two positions that are almost certainly irreconcilable. On the one hand, we have signed up for Kyoto and taken a lead in arguing the urgency of the climate change imperative. On the other, we brought into government a generational prejudice against nuclear power that evolved largely on the premise that it is the other side of the coin that is nuclear weapons.

Historically, this contention is probably true. There might not have been a civil nuclear industry had it not been a by-product of military investment. But while that is an interesting historical and political fact, it is not a persuasive argument against a present- day assessment of what nuclear power has to offer.

If Tony Benn was able to overcome that same ideological barrier almost 40 years ago, when left-wing concern about 'the nuclear threat' was a great deal more intense, then there is no reason for it to daunt anyone today. But the case, now as then, must be argued. It has to be shown that anti-nuclearism in the age of global warming is a deeply conservative position.

Ask people whether they are in favour of new nuclear power stations and you will probably get 75 per cent against. But ask them if they think Britain should remain capable of generating enough electricity to meet our national needs, based on indigenous resources, and you will get even more than that in favour. At that point, the read-across to maintaining a substantial nuclear component is not difficult to establish.

When we published an Energy White Paper last year, two major objectives were put up in lights. The first was the fundamentally important requirement to ensure security of supply. But the second, reflecting the priorities of the age, was carbon reduction. This led to a huge emphasis being placed on renewables - which I am all in favour of. But renewables, unfortunately, do not deliver the stable base-load that is required to deliver security of supply.

For those who oppose nuclear, the familiar alternative position is to urge a far more massive commitment to renewable energy than even the one that the government has offered. At this point, however, there is a vast dichotomy between aspiration and delivery. To meet even the 2010 targets, we have to bring onstream each year a renewables capacity equivalent to the total that already exists. The idea that we can double or treble that outcome is fantasy, particularly in the light of public opposition to wind farms.

As things stand, no matter how successful we are in delivering on renewables targets, the outcome in carbon-reduction terms for the next 20 years will only be to cancel out what we are throwing away through the run-down of carbon-free nuclear generation. I firmly believe that, as climate change rises through the league table of political concerns, that approach will become unsustainable. Surely it is better to pre-empt that mood by making the case for nuclear new-build, probably on existing nuclear sites.

It is a myth that the world is turning its back on nuclear. A couple of dozen countries are currently planning new nuclear programmes - from the geographically close France to the ideologically liberal Finland, not to mention our G8 partners in Japan and the United States. I recall asking the Finnish energy minister how they had managed to deliver this outcome. She replied: 'Through eight years of honest debate.'

Maybe it is time we began a similar, if truncated, process. The most effective argument against a new nuclear programme is that we still do not know what to do with the waste. But beware those who use this issue as a convenient show-stopper and want to make new- build consecutive upon an 'answer' to the question.

It has not been beyond the wit of other countries to find publicly acceptable solutions, particularly now that retrievability has been established as being deliverable. In any case, waste is overwhelmingly a legacy issue. The waste produced by a new generation of nuclear stations would be incremental only at the margins.

By 2020, most of Britain's electricity will be generated from imported gas. There is no doubt or argument about that. The outstanding issues are those of degree.

How dependent do we want to become on imported primary energy sources? How much can renewables realistically be expected to deliver at affordable cost?

Sensible answers to these two questions will lead inexorably to the conclusion that the case for nuclear is as strong now as when Tony Benn drove it in the 1960s. We should get on with it.

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