Michael Meacher

Labour Party | Oldham West and Royton

Nuclear Energy - Sustainability or vengeance?

Speaking to the CBI, Tony Blair has finally made his long suspected support for civil nuclear power explicit , ahead of the government’s own Energy Review. Previously, it was widely believed that the purpose of this review was to enable the Prime Minister to reverse the decisions of the 2003 Energy White Paper. This proposed a major expansion in renewable energy combined with enhanced conservation efforts to compensate for decommissioning ageing nuclear plants, whose contribution to UK energy generation will fall from 19% to 7% by 2020.

Since then, the debate around reduction of carbon emissions has seen nuclear power advocates leap on the green bandwagon, claiming it is carbon neutral (it is not) to justify a new civil nuclear power programme. It was these arguments that Blair cited when warning that nuclear power was “back on the agenda with a vengeance.”

In this context, the sale of BNFL’s British Nuclear Group (BNG), is enormously significant. The sale opens access to three huge income streams. One is guaranteed from a successful purchase, placing BNG’s buyer in pole position to access the other two.

The first of these money flows comes via BNG’s contract to clean up the UK’s nuclear waste, initially at Sellafield, subsequently at other nuclear power stations as they are decommissioned. The Sellafield deal alone is worth £1bn a year for its first five years. There will be an option to extend if it is deemed to have been a success. Over the next 75 years, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) will spend a similar amount annually on closing the UK’s obsolete nuclear power stations, the second income stream.
 
UK companies such as Amec would obviously like to bid for this lucrative work. They will face stiff competition from the likes of US giants Halliburton and Fluor. The NDA’s £72 billion nuclear waste clean up pot makes it an attractive business proposition. It is the US companies who have most experience in the nuclear sector – identified by the NDA as a crucial factor in awarding contracts.

Those involved in cleaning up old waste are likely to be first in line for the third income stream if the government decides to sanction the building of new nuclear power plants, making the Prime Minister’s backing for nuclear power all the more important.

Were this alone insufficient encouragement to attract bids, one has to look only at the budget speech given by Gordon Brown, where he promised that the UK government would promote the liberalisation of European energy markets with failure to open up to competition penalised with “independent investigation and enforcement”.

So there are two powerful drivers from the very top of UK government. Strategically, from the Prime Minister for nuclear power and economically, from the Chancellor for the private sector to earn vast sums decommissioning old plants and building new ones.

Yet we simply do not need a new generation of nuclear plants.  The downsides are stark. It’s more expensive - half as expensive again as gas, up to twice as expensive as wind. It’s more dangerous - nuclear power means a waste stream containing some of the most toxic materials known to man. Yet no one knows what to do with it. And mining uranium ore is far from carbon neutral.

In the meantime renewables have never been seriously tried, despite the fact that, for example, the potential for wind power in Britain is recognised to be far ahead of both Germany and Spain, the EU’s leading markets, and on a global basis above Texas, the previously strongest market.

As with telecommunications and the EU services directive, a neo-liberal outlook is driving government energy policy. This is no way to protect employment, skills or trade union rights. We need a rather more measured - and social - examination of the UK’s energy needs than the Prime Minister and Chancellor’s words would suggest.