UK: Nuclear debate needs fresh source of energy

Tony Blair has had nearly 10 years to face up to the growing threat from climate change and the inevitable consequences for how we power and light our homes, work and public spaces in future. Our existing stock of nuclear stations, still generating a fifth of all the UK’s electricity needs, is well into middle age, heading for retirement.

How to replace that capacity – and ageing fossil-fuelled plants as well – is an issue that’s been crying out for clear leadership and informed advocacy for years. But New Labour has fudged that challenge, cowering behind successive, voluminous energy reviews, while the prime minister smuggled his own conversion to a new nuclear build programme into an aside in a speech to industrialists.
“While they talk about transitioning to a low-carbon system,” wrote Patrick Moore, a lifelong environmentalist and co-founder of Greenpeace, in yesterday’s Independent, “they dismiss nuclear, the only energy source capable of actually delivering us from an increasing use of fossil fuels and their resulting carbon emissions.

“It is simply not credible to claim that wind and solar energy can replace coal and natural gas. Wind and solar are, by nature, intermittent, and therefore not capable of delivering the baseload power required for an energy grid . . . Simply put, the only choice is between fossil fuel and nuclear.”

Oh no it’s not, the green lobby will counter. Go for a decentralised energy system instead, they will urge, one based on maximum use of combined heat and power and renewable energy, when anyone who has ever looked seriously at the numbers knows that approach can never fill the approaching nuclear void. They know it can’t.

For their ultimate aim is to shock us all out of our energy-profligate ways. And demonising nuclear power to such an extent in the public mind that no new station will ever be constructed again is part of a dream of turning the clock back to pre-industrial times. If the price is burning even more fossil fuel in the short-term, so be it.

The Herald