John Sauven

Even the government admits this. It’s too little, too late at too high a price. Nuclear can only produce electricity, but 86% of our oil and gas consumption is for purposes other than producing electricity. Most of the gas we use is for heating, hot water and for industrial purposes.

It’s a similar case for oil as it’s virtually all used for transport – nuclear power can’t take its place either. Unless the government is proposing atomic central heating, nuclear is almost irrelevant to energy security and climate change.

The real solutions to the energy gap and climate change are available now. Energy efficiency, cleaner use of fossil fuels, renewables and state-of-the-art decentralised power stations. Together they have the potential to deliver reliable low-carbon energy quicker and cheaper. They are also safe and globally applicable, unlike nuclear, but these technologies will be strangled if cash and political energy get thrust at nuclear power.

Gordon Brown very recently committed the UK to a huge increase in the proportion of electricity from renewables. When I asked him if he accepted that 40 to 45% of UK electricity would come from renewable sources by 2020 he replied: ‘Yes, I do accept that it would be a very demanding target for Britain and whether it’s the figure that you mentioned or a figure around that, we are going to have to change quite fundamentally.’

This means generating 33 gigawatts of offshore wind and kick-starting other renewable and decentralised technologies in which Britain can lead the world. It means building super-efficient power stations on the Scandinavian model – ones which are 90% efficient or more and can use both fossil fuels and cleaner fuels like biomass – and it means designing products and appliances that use energy more efficiently.

Going for nuclear allows politicians to give the impression
they are taking difficult decisions

If we do that we won’t need new nuclear power stations and Britain could become a world leader in clean energy. At the moment, Germany has 300 times as much solar power and 10 times as much wind power installed as the UK and has given up on nuclear. We could do the same.

Going nuclear isn’t just unnecesary, it would also squeeze out the investment in renewables that we would need to achieve Brown’s new target. Indeed, then secretary of state for business Patricia Hewitt said in a Commons debate on the 2003 energy white paper: ‘It would have been foolish to announce …. that we would embark on a new generation of nuclear power stations because that would have guaranteed that we would not make the necessary investment and effort in both energy efficiency and in renewables.’ Since then, nothing has changed.

Another insider, Jeremy Leggett, says: ‘The Department of Trade and Industry set up a renewables advisory board to advise ministers how to execute the white paper plan in November 2002. By September 2003 the board’s industry members, of which I was one, were already troubled by slow progress and issued a statement of concern. One warned me that DTI officials would deliberately go slowly to keep their hopes for nuclear alive; renewables would be teed up to fail. I didn’t believe it at the time, but recently I have heard two of Tony Blair’s senior colleagues confirm that the DTI has long suppressed renewables to make space for nuclear.’

Margaret Thatcher promised 10 new reactors when she was in power. Just one was built. Going for nuclear allows politicians to project the impression that they are taking difficult decisions to solve difficult problems. In reality, going for nuclear simply will not solve our energy problems, but other low-carbon technologies will.