Gaseous posted by Meaders

This sort of thing always cheers me up:

Anti-nuclear protesters from Greenpeace this morning disrupted an anticipated speech at the CBI conference by Tony Blair, unfurling a banner with the slogan "Nuclear: Wrong Answer".

The prime minister had been due to formally announce a review of British energy policy, which many predict will herald the building of a new generation of domestic nuclear reactors.

Blair, with his usual precision, is marching towards the worst possible solution out of all the available options. Compounding the government’s miserable failure to tackle the demand for carbon emissions, most glaringly from private transport, the UK faces an incipient energy shortage. Within a decade, the Geological Society of London estimate, Britain will be producing only 80% of the electricity it consumes. The BBC asks:

So why is Britain - the world's fourth largest economy, a nuclear pioneer, blessed with wind, wave and tidal potential beyond the normal lot of nations, a once mighty coal producer, provider of innovators to the world, and with a generation's worth of North Sea booty to invest - facing an enormous shortfall in electricity provision while others are not?

They don’t bother supplying an answer, but it should be glaringly obvious: the UK’s liberalised energy markets, like those elsewhere, are grossly inadequate for the task set them. This is recognised by Blair, in his own dim way, since the promotion of nuclear power as the magic cure will require colossal government intervention, whatever its apologists will have us believe: on no possible basis can the invisible hand of the market be allowed to construct its own reactors, secure its own fuel supplies - and then safely cover its noxious droppings for the next million years.

But the very creation of this “liberalised” electricity market necessitated government intervention. During the simultaneous destruction of the nationalised coal and electricity industries, UK electricity production was kept afloat by the deliberate promotion of North Sea natural gas. The extraordinarily costly infrastructure was already in place, funded by more far-sighted public administrators: the UK’s largest gas storage facility, for example, is a depleted gas field, off the Yorkshire coast, that was converted to natural gas storage at vast, public expense. Without it, reliable gas supplies cannot be maintained all year; with 35% of UK electricity now produced from burning natural gas, it has proved vital, if still inadequate.

The so-called “dash for gas” was a short-term solution for the immediate problems of the Conservative government in breaking up what they saw as the antiquated, state-dominated structures of the British economy: with the unions broken, coal production was wound down, power-supply privatised, and the transition to liberalised energy markets dependent upon apparently cheap sources of power. In no sense was it a long-term plan for future energy use; and in no sense has New Labour dealt with its inadequacies. Typically, some early promises to end the “dash” were allowed to fall aside as, after levying a token “windfall tax” on the privatised utilities, the Blair governments trooped back onto the path the Tories had cleared for them: cheap gas, cheap electricity, and don’t worry too much about the future. Natural gas reserves, in an elderly field like the North Sea, were always going to decline; yet even the minimal provision of gas import facilities has been provided very late in the day, the UK’s one major import pipeline opening only in 1998, and its one substantial liquid natural gas terminal only just being completed.

Blair’s failure to plan has led us to the absurd situation in which a suicidally dangerous and deliriously costly failed technology is being resurrected. His government’s failure to plan is a direct result of its unwillingness to confront the electricity market’s vested interests. Because they postponed difficult decisions about promoting renewable resources and energy efficiency, and because they reneged on their environmental pledges, New Labour are prepared to expose us all to the risks of a new generation of Chernobyls. It is obvious that Blair will be remembered for the catastrophe of Iraq; but the lurch towards nuclear power presents with another singularly ill-considered and hazardous scheme to find magic solutions where none exist.

George Monbiot, here, offers some non-magical, practical routes out of the current mess. The Campaign Against Climate Change will be marching this Saturday in central London.