Philobiblon

Why, oh why, should Tony Blair have last night come out in favour of nuclear power, effectively killing the yet-to-be-completed energy review of his own government? (Which follows a completed review of just two years ago that dismissed the option.)

Mr Blair’s spokesman said the prime minister was speaking after reading “a first cut” of the Department of Trade and Industry-led review on Monday. He said the country could not rely on one new source to meet the coming energy gap, pointing out that renewable energy, such as wind and solar power, had technical problems…. Mr Blair said: “Essentially, the twin pressures of climate change and energy security are raising energy policy to the top of the agenda in the UK and around the world.

First, to tackle the climate change side of the equation: this site illustrates with great clarity that nuclear energy is not a carbon-neutral option. Producing nuclear fuels, and building power stations, produces a great deal of it.

You can download a paper from that site that concludes:

The CO2 produced by the full nuclear life cycle is about one half to one third of an equivalent sized gas-fired power station. For low quality ores (less than 0.02% of U₃O₈ per tonne of ore), the CO2 produced by the full nuclear life cycle is EQUAL TO that produced by the equivalent gas-fired power station.

As for the “technical problems” – it is worth restating that most renewables are not “new” technology, particularly in the case of solar and wind. About 28 years ago in Australia, my family put a solar hot water heater on the house, which worked perfectly well, without any dramas at all, for the 14 or so years after that for which we continued to own the house.

Certainly both solar and wind power do not provide a steady supply, but there are ways of managing that; tidal and wave power, for example, are going to be predictable and can be intermixed with them.

And as the South-East of England is finding also with water, we might have to give up the expectation that you can just at any time use vast quantities of resources for no good purpose – which is why energy conservation is the other side of this equation.

So why did Mr Blair do this? Good question.

Perhaps it is partly an age thing – he is of the generation of the first nuclear power stations, which promised a magic cure of “free”, endless power (as we now knnow a myth). Plus, as a man at that stage of political career obsessed with “his legacy”, he likes the idea of a country dotted with huge, hideous, monuments to him.

As someone on BBC Radio Four said this morning, had the Emperor Claudius brought nuclear power to Britain with his Roman legions, the waste from his power plants would still be highly dangerous and have to be guarded and contained.

Some legacy.