Britain should go nuclear to combat climate change

Britain has now gone a week without using coal to generate electricity. It’s the first coal-free week since 1882, and two years after the UK had its first day without coal since the industrial revolution.

This is good news, as burning coal is one of the dirtiest forms of creating electricity. You can see what an achievement this is by going on to www.gridwatch.co.uk. The live electricity monitoring site shows at any time the most precise sources of the UK’s energy. Bang in the middle of the page is the dial that says Coal shows O GW.

Then look at the other dials to see where the 36.9 GW of total energy being consumed in the UK – at the time of writing – comes from. By far the biggest chunk of electricity is from CCGT, or gas, which provides around 42% of all electric power. Renewables are the source of 31.7%, made up largely of wind providing 20%, solar around 6.7% and biomass, around 4%. Another 6% or so comes from inter-connecters under the sea from the continent.

Of these electricity sources, about 50% is what is categorised as low-carbon. And the main sources of low carbon energy are nuclear, wind, solar and the other renewables. As the energy from wind and solar are highly dependent on the weather, that leaves nuclear as the single biggest source of stable and secure low carbon power – whatever the weather. For example, using nuclear power took emissions of 22.7 million tonnes of CO₂ a year – the equivalent of taking around a third of Britain’s cars off the roads – out of the atmosphere.

But the latest report from the Committee on Climate Change – the CCC – has just called on the government to set a target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. What this means is that if the ambitions of the CCC are taken up by the government and enshrined in law, another half of all the UK’s energy has to be decarbonised within 30 years.

Is that goal possible, without a massive scientific breakthrough in new battery technologies for the storage of wind or solar? Or indeed, new technologies that have yet to be developed?

Tim Stone, the new chairman of the Nuclear Industry Association, says this goal is almost impossible to be met. While Stone says the CCC’s report rightly highlights the scale of change needed to achieve net zero by 2050, the report grossly miscalculates just how it can be achieved in reality. That’s because alternative ways of reducing carbon emissions such as carbon capture, sequestration and using hydrogen, solutions much favoured by the CCC and several government ministers, are far too expensive and difficult to achieve just yet.

“What we need to do is change the entire system of energy provision. But what they – the CCC and politicians – are doing is poking around in little bits. It is not going to work when you have such intermittency of supply and demand. You have got to have renewables in the mix and demand and supply at a sensible price.” Price is the magical word.

Stone invites us to indulge in a ‘daft’ thought experiment. “Imagine for a moment that all electricity was supplied by only renewables, by wind and solar without any back-up when there are is no wind blowing or sun shining. We estimate the cost of supplying enough electricity from renewables alone for one hour would cost as much as Hinkley Point.” That’s billions and billions – for one hour.

Which is why Stone argues that new nuclear is essential to providing the UK with sufficient low-carbon electricity. He’s right and it’s also why Greg Clarke, probably the most useless of a long-line of useless Business Secretaries, must go back to the drawing board and look again at why it failed to support the Japanese in building two new nuclear plants at Moorside and Wylfa, in Wales, which together were due to provide a big slice of electricity for the next few generations.

Without new nuclear, the UK is storing up an explosive problem. As Stone says, “Other than building new nuclear, there is no other way of providing enough low-carbon energy. It would be ludicrous to overlook low carbon technologies that have provided clean reliable electricity for decades in favour of new, expensive and unproven ones.”

To prove a point, Stone is commissioning new research by academics and engineers to study the UK’s future energy needs in a more robust manner than that suggested by the CCC’s ambitious but idealistic report.

Of course, Stone accepts that renewables are an essential part of getting the future mix of energy sources right. But he argues they are not by any means the only solution.

Yet if you were to believe the climate change activists, from the Extinction Rebellion people to US politician, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sweden’s teenager, Greta Thunberg, if we don’t go completely renewable and ban fossil-fuel cars and air flights the world will end.

For some bizarre reason, nuclear doesn’t figure in their numbers despite its efficacy. A growing number of countries such as Sweden and France have achieved the lowest carbon emissions by relying on high levels of nuclear power: nearly half of all power in Sweden is nuclear and more than two-thirds in France.

Finding new solutions is also costly. Over the last decade about $2 trillion has been spent on building solar and wind yet solar only accounts for about 1.3% and wind for 3.9% of all the world’s power generated.

This is not to say renewable technologies should not be pursued, and improved. Of course, they should. But we also need to be upfront that there will be a cost to everyone because of the gigantic subsidies involved. Consumers will be the hardest hit as they will inevitably end up paying higher electricity prices if the UK government were to adopt the CCC’s recommendations.

So who or what to believe? Dr Benny Peiser of the Global Warming Policy Forum, a think tank that likes to challenge the new orthodoxy, claims the UK has simply exported its emissions to other parts of the world, principally China, through carbon leakage resulting from high energy costs in the UK – costs which were the result of climate policies. He goes further, claiming: “Far from being a success on which we can build, UK climate policy has been a failure, resulting only in domestic economic damage and the illusion of reduced emissions.”

It’s also true that many of the renewable technologies are not cost-free from an environmental point of view and we must be up-front about their impact. Indeed, the hypocrisy about the real-cost of renewables is mind-boggling: it’s been shown that wind farms destroy the local wildlife habitat and use up huge amounts of carbon making the concrete and steel to build them while solar farms use up massive amounts of land which could be forested.

Yet switching to nuclear is fully carbon-free, apart from the one-off effect of building the plants which is about the same as a solar or wind farm. Paradoxically, nuclear is still the safest.

As you would expect, Greg Clarke and his fellow energy ministers, have already greeted this report with warm words. They dare not do otherwise. But hopefully they will kick it into the long grass like everything else they are doing. And start again. Honesty rather than humbug is what is now needed.

Let us know your view. Send a letter for publication to letters@reaction.life