Getting to grips with the power struggle

Which will it be?

IN THE tit-for-tat propaganda war over nuclear power, rabbit droppings have become the latest and unlikely focus of debate.

Researchers in Washington have discovered that the animals have been leaving droppings that contain traces of plutonium around a nuclear waste facility in Hanford. The rabbits had apparently burrowed near the store and developed a taste for the salty contaminated waste.

The nuclear industry’s response was dramatic. It scrambled a helicopter equipped with radiation detection equipment to locate the stools and mapped them with GPS coordinates, so they could be gathered and destroyed. This, said the nuclear industry, was an example of effective waste management. Poop, said the anti-nuclear lobby, which claimed that the episode highlighted the risks of nuclear storage.

With puerile debates like this it is no wonder that people are confused about nuclear power and the best way of meeting our future energy needs.

New nuclear build is firmly back on the UK agenda. This month Lord Turner’s Climate Change Committee recommended a relaxation of planning laws to allow new stations by 2022. In Wales, discussions continue over the future of the Wylfa plant on Anglesey and whether it should be the site for a new reactor. The debate intensified this weekend with the Wylfa facility used as the platform for the latest round of policy announcements in the Welsh Labour leadership race.

So it’s decision time. As citizens we are being asked to make a choice between different forms of future electricity generation – principally nuclear and coal. Renewables don’t have the scale or capacity to plug the supply gap in the short-term. The current UK demand for electricity is 358 billion kilowatt hours. Despite all our energy saving initiatives, demand is expected to rise to 381 billion kilowatt hours by 2020. Combined with a number of power stations nearing the end of their lives, this leaves a considerable gap in future supply.

The main political parties’ policies on energy supply don’t help make the decision any easier. All are committed to tackling climate change but none seriously address the shorter-term problem of the looming supply gap.

Labour’s UK-wide policies are bereft of detail, preferring instead to trumpet ‘key achievements’. This weekend the three contenders in the Welsh leadership contest went a little further by outlining their ideas on energy supply. All trumpet addressing climate change as their priority but offer three different ways of addressing it. Carwyn Jones proposes a mix of nuclear, clean coal and renewables; Edwina Hart keeps the door open to nuclear but adopts a very a sceptical view. Huw Lewis focuses on small scale micro-generators as the way of meeting the country’s energy needs alongside a vision for a mixed energy economy that includes Wylfa B.

The Conservatives national energy policies are more detailed than Labour’s but are full of holes. The party says that new coal power stations must be equipped with carbon capture. Fine, but it has never been commercially deployed anywhere in the World. The party also says that the taxpayer should not pick up the liabilities of waste or decommissioning from nuclear, effectively rendering this form of generation uneconomic.

The Liberal Democrats offer a novel scheme for ‘personal carbon trading’ but duck the generation question. Plaid Cymru, meanwhile, occupy the novel position of opposing nuclear power while being led by a man who wholeheartedly supports it for his constituency.

Confused? Well, you needn’t be. We don’t need to choose between nuclear and coal as this is the wrong question.

Electricity is like a commodity. It doesn’t come in ‘premium’ or ‘value’ ranges, it is consistent: 15 watts of nuclear electricity produces the same light from a bulb as the electricity from a coal, gas or oil-fired generator.

The only way to decide between new nuclear and coal is to consider what economists call externalities – by-products of producing. In the case of electricity generation, there are some positive by-products – contribution to GDP and employment – but most are bad.

Nuclear power produces toxic waste and coal power emits CO2. So, rather than choosing between nuclear or coal, we need to decide which is worst: contributing to global warming or burying toxic waste in the countryside. Both, of course, are undesirable. But with renewables unable to meet our short-term energy needs it’s either lights-out or deciding which is the lesser of the two evils.

Once we have made the choice we can relax. We can let the markets, primed with incentives to favour the least-worst choice, do the rest. We do this by taxing the bad externalities according to our choices and assigning tradable property rights to them. We then need to make an immutable commitment not to tinker with this system, as new power stations take a long time to plan and build.

The markets will deliver an efficient mix of generation skewed towards the choice we made about pollution and waste.