Stephen Tarlton says economic and environmental considerations have put nuclear energy back on the agenda

LAST week’s call from Gordon Brown for an expansion of the nuclear energy supply should have come as no surprise. Far from being a response to the immediate energy crisis – which it will do little to alleviate – the die was finally cast when John Hutton, the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, told Parliament on January 10 that: “Nuclear power should play a role in providing Britain with clean, secure and affordable energy”.

This was from the same Government that, only five years earlier, all but killed off any hope of new nuclear build in its 2003 energy white paper, Our energy future – creating a low carbon economy. So how did such a dramatic change of opinion come about and has the Government got its nuclear policy right this time?

The saving grace of nuclear power is that it produces virtually no carbon dioxide emissions. It is wrong to claim that new nuclear would not make much of a difference to this country’s carbon emissions targets. Put simply, any electricity produced by future nuclear power stations will be generated without the emission of significant amounts of carbon dioxide – in fact, less carbon dioxide than if that same quantity of electricity were produced by wind farms.

While it has taken a while for the current administration to understand this fully, it’s hardly a recent discovery. Back in November 1989, Margaret Thatcher gave a speech at the United Nations on the part that nuclear power could play in mitigating the effects of global warming.

In the run-up to the 2003 energy white paper, Margaret Beckett (then Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) and Patricia Hewitt (then Secretary of State for Trade and Industry) naively believed that alternative sources of energy generation should be given a chance to show that the country could achieve its hugely ambitious emissions targets without nuclear power. It is clear the Government now realises that renewable energy can provide only a part of the solution to lowering carbon dioxide emissions – as can nuclear power. With emissions reduction higher up the list of priorities, the nuclear option had to be put back on the agenda.

Of course, there are a number of concerns about nuclear power. As the 2003 energy white paper pointed out: “Its current economics make new nuclear build an unattractive option and there are important issues of nuclear waste to be resolved.” So, in these two crucial areas, what has changed in the past five years?

On the economics, there’s no escaping the fact that nuclear power stations are very expensive to build. On the other hand, why should this matter to anyone other than those financing new plants?

The nuclear industry would be in full agreement that in the present climate, investment in new nuclear does not make economic sense. However, given clarity in a few areas – in particular, the planning process, licensing of reactor designs and sites, the long-term price of carbon, along with provisions for back-end liabilities – the industry believes that new nuclear power stations would be a viable commercial proposition.

In turn, the Government is responding with a package of “facilitative actions” in order to “reduce uncertainties in the pre-construction period through improvements to the regulatory and planning processes”, as the nuclear white paper published in January puts it.

These “facilitative actions” could be viewed as subsidies. Putting a price on carbon – and thereby taxing nuclear power’s main competitors – is to some an indirect subsidy. Others will regard it simply as internalising the costs of “pollution”. As for the back-end costs of nuclear, both the Government and the nuclear industry would claim the industry will bear the full costs of waste and decommissioning, whereas opponents say that future taxpayers will be the ultimate guarantors.

Whatever the case, the relative economics of nuclear energy are changing as a result of the “facilitative actions” currently being implemented by the Government. When the industry has enough confidence – for example, by knowing that vexatious complainants would not be able to delay projects unduly during the planning process – it will finally be in a position to decide whether to invest in new build.

On the issue of waste management, the main development has been the Government’s October 2006 response to the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management’s proposals on the long-term management of radioactive waste. CoRWM had recommended that nuclear waste currently in existence or already committed should be managed through geological disposal, with interim storage arrangements until a repository is available. Despite CoRWM’s insistence that its recommendations do not apply to waste from a possible new build programme, the Government’s view appears to be that we now have a final solution for nuclear waste – past, present and future. Some in the industry agree, while others do not even consider it necessary to have a final solution to the disposal of new waste before deciding to build new plants.

In any case, the Government appears to have convinced itself that those “important issues of nuclear waste” referred to in the 2003 white paper have now been resolved– or are at least well on the way to being resolved. One can safely say that we’ve not heard the last on this.

There are other concerns: safety, radioactive emissions and security of nuclear materials. However, it is possible to address all the challenges surrounding the embrace of nuclear energy, so long as we are given the time, space and a dispassionate arena in which to do so.

Such issues are comprehensively analysed in the book Core Issues – Dissecting Nuclear Power Today by Steve Kidd of the World Nuclear Association, published last month. However, as Kidd points out, there remain those “who will never be swayed, as nuclear embodies all they hate about modern society”. He says: “These people are deeply uncomfortable with the way the modern capitalist system works, with the trend towards globalisation of production.”

This gets to the root of the problem with nuclear power: it is associated with big government and big industry – and probably always will be. Any moves towards globalisation and more authority assumed by central government are galling for many. So, the debate over new nuclear power stations in Britain is not about whether these would consist of a fleet of Chernobyls operated by a bunch of Homer Simpsons. It is really about an underlying concern over taking a big – and perhaps irreversible – step down the road of what is often described as “progress”.

Stephen Tarlton is editor of Nuclear Engineering International magazine and website