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Bill Carmichael: Powerful reasons for going nuclear
YESTERDAY'S announcement that the Government has given the go-ahead to a new generation of nuclear power plants drew predictable howls of outrage from the green lobby.
One minute they are complaining that the Government is not taking the threat of global warming seriously enough, the next they complain even louder when the Government takes the issue seriously and pledges to do something about it.
There's just no pleasing some people.
Let's make this absolutely plain for the seriously hard of thinking – nuclear power is the only proven and cost-effective way of producing the large amounts of electricity we need, without massively increasing carbon emissions.
And let's not forget that this isn't an "expansion" of nuclear power as many
eco-activists seemed to think yesterday,
but a replacement of older nuclear
plants with newer, safer and more
efficient ones.
Currently – excuse the pun – about 20 per cent of our electricity comes from nuclear, but by 2023 all but one of our nuclear plants are scheduled to close, leaving a huge gap between electricity production and consumption – a gap that will only grow wider if demand increases as expected.
We need to act urgently if the lights are not to go out – but how? We could burn more coal, but this would increase carbon emissions, despite the exciting pioneering work on clean-coal technology and bio-mass at plants like Drax.
We could import more gas, but again this would increase carbon emissions and leave us exposed to blackmail from the unstable and often nasty rgimes in eastern Europe that produce the stuff.
The carbon capture and storage notion, much trumpeted by the green lobby, is an untried technology that has not even been trialled successfully at power stations in
the UK.
What about renewables, such as wind, solar and wave power? They make a
valuable contribution – about five per cent of our electricity needs, thanks to big government subsidies – but let's keep this
in perspective.
It would take about 400 10-megawatt wind farms the size of Ovenden Moor to replace a single 4,000-megawatt coal-fired power plant such as Drax.
To replace all the obsolete nuclear plants and all the coal-fired power stations with renewables would require the building of wind farms and tidal projects on an unprecedented scale.
We would need thousands of wind farms with tens of thousands of turbines. Where are we going to put them all? Wind farm
and tidal-generation projects invariably elicit vigorous objections – often from precisely the same people who oppose nuclear power.
But even if all the objections could be overcome and much of Britain was covered with turbines, it still wouldn't solve the problem because of what the power industry calls base load. In other words, where is the electricity going to come
from when the wind isn't blowing? At present, whatever the weather conditions, the base load is provided by coal, gas
and nuclear.
Imagine a scenario in 20 years' time. It is a freezing, winter evening. We've closed all the nuclear power plants and coal-fired stations because of the objections of a few sanctimonious tree-huggers.
The Russians have turned off the gas
tap because we refuse to pay through
the nose.
Then, all of sudden in the still January air, the turbines stop turning.
What happens then? Well, the lights go out, pensioners freeze to death and all the machines in the special-care baby unit go blank, that's what.
Perhaps when the power cuts come, the anti-nuclear warriors will be first in the queue to volunteer to do without power – but I wouldn't bet on it.
As for me, I'm thinking of re-designing that old sticker you used to see a few years ago on the back of Citron 2CVs – Nuclear Power? Ja Bitte!
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Saturday 11 February 2012
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