And why shouldn't we go nuclear?

By Sir Bernard Ingham

Presented to the 'GAIA and Global Change Conference', Dartington, Devon, UK on 4 June 2004.

The very title of my talk "And why shouldn't we go nuclear?" - and I did not choose it - speaks volumes for the environment in which this conference is being held. That environment is predominantly anti-nuclear or, at best, "agnostic" towards atomic power, as the current buzzword has it. So, I'm the fall guy put up to ask why we should not go nuclear, even though we in the UK have been safely, reliably and economically nuclear for 48 years.

In that time, nuclear has generated up to a third of our electricity without mishap - now 22% - and without any recorded death from a radiation accident. It must be the safest form of energy production yet devised by man. What is more, it has generated this huge amount of power without emitting greenhouse gases.

It is just what the doctor ordered in a world that needs clean power. And yet, here in the 21st Century, in a hi-tech age which long since put man on the moon, penetrates millions of miles into the universe and here on Earth has a spare parts service for damaged humans, we have to ask, somewhat defiantly, "And why shouldn't we go nuclear?".

It is, if I may say so, somewhat reminiscent of policy making in No 10 in my days. The dominatrix, seven leagues ahead of everyone else, tells us all what the policy to end a failing post-war consensus should be and then, laser-beam eyes fully operational, challenges the lot of us to tell her why we shouldn't have it. Deny me if you dare!

Well, before I show you why you should not deny me, I should say that I am no scientist. Indeed, I am somewhat wary of scientists. I had assumed that science proceeded on the basis of proof or, at the very least, balance of probabilities. Now I find it proceeds all too often on a businesslike basis - otherwise known as you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. I am now on my guard against scientists who espouse a particular idea such as carbon sequestration as the answer to our environmental prayers. Something tells me they might be in the market for research grants which are, of course, prized by cash-strapped universities.

And finding weak, politically correct politicians an alternative to nuclear power is calculated to cause the research fund to shell out generously. By the same token, advocating nuclear power - as Professor Lovelock has done - is not the wisest course if you wish to remain in business as a researcher.

My regard for scientists was not improved by the report in last week-end's Sunday Telegraph that, according to Oxford University academics, scientists are routinely cherry picking the results of clinical trials to present the findings they want and not disclosing those which are inconvenient. I think it is important at a conference such as this for scientists to recognise they have, to put it mildly, an image problem.

However, I doubt whether I shall be summarily expelled from Dartington. The scientists here assembled would not be here if they were not independent-minded - and remarkably diffident, I have discovered.

You will nonetheless gather from this that I am no diplomat either. I don't intend to soft soap - still less spin - you into going nuclear. Instead, I propose to appeal to your common sense. I do so as one who served in the Department of Energy for five years from the oil crisis of 1974 to 1979 and for the last two years was responsible for energy conservation policy and renewable sources of energy.

I base my common sense case on five assumptions:

• First, that it is the wish of the people to maintain and improve their comfortable and convenient lifestyle and that they will not easily be persuaded to give it up. I assume they utterly reject the implied but never stated desire of Greenpeace/Friends of the Earth etc to return to a pre-industrial economy, provided, of course, they can still throw stunts, fly the world to demonstrate against G8 summits and have the continued pain-suppressing benefits of modern medicine.


• Second, that the people also recognise that if they wish to have it better so will the billions who have it worse - and usually much worse - and that if these people are to better themselves they cannot do so without the vastly increased amounts of energy that figure in projections of future demand. That introduces a moral dimension to energy supply issues.


• Third, that the people expect science and technology to find a way of feeding the world and powering steady improvements in their lot. They know that their present lifestyle depends on technology and they expect man's ingenuity to continue to deliver an even better one.


• Fourth, that we are unlikely to produce a breed or calibre of democratic politician who could win and retain power by advocating sackcloth and ashes, still less by practising it.


• And fifth, that in common prudence we ought to aim for an energy policy which seeks security of supply at affordable cost while at the same time minimising greenhouse gas emissions. That would require a mix of energy sources.

I could have added specifically instead of implicitly a sixth assumption: namely global warming. I shall not do so. It smacks too much for me of opportunism. Instead, I shall rely on common sense. And common sense tells me that, global warming or not, we should not pour damaging gases into the atmosphere if we can avoid it.

On the basis of these assumptions you would not have expected homo sapiens to have run away from nuclear power. He has done so because events have played into the hands of a minority of dedicated and unscrupulous activists. These people have built on commendable early initiatives showing the people how much they were abusing the Earth to seek to frustrate the continued operation of capitalism, as we know it.

I don't believe that much environmental campaigning these days has much to do with the environment. It is driven by political goals that ignore the appalling state into which the environment can fall in Communist dictatorships. I don't think capitalism is all that brilliant a way either of conducting our affairs. But, rather as Winston Churchill regarded democracy, so I regard capitalism. It is better than the alternatives. In any case, we are stuck with it since Communism has fortunately crumbled. Otherwise, this conference would be entitled "Gaia and global incineration".

I was intimately connected with the start of the environmental campaign against nuclear power in this country. My Secretary of State, Tony Benn, conspired in the mid-1970s with Friends of the Earth behind all our backs in the Department of Energy to label Sellafield "the world's nuclear dustbin". The nuclear industry, made up of a Civil Service scientific elite brought up in a tradition of defence secrecy, was worse than useless in combating this threat to its existence. It still is.

Then came Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. You would not have thought that not a single death occurred at Three Mile Island or that research has demonstrated there have been no adverse effects outside the plant. Chernobyl, probably the worst nuclear power disaster you could imagine - caused by irresponsible experiment - then showered the world with radioactivity, though massively less than from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s. But, according to 700 scientists working under UN auspices on the medical consequences of Chernobyl exposure to radioactivity, there have been only 45 deaths as a result of radiation.

It is true that there have been some 2,000 cases of treatable thyroid cancer, caused by inadequate treatment at the time, but no increased incidence of leukaemia has been detected. When I went to Chernobyl in 1994 - eight years after the disaster - the countryside was teeming with wildlife. Peasants had drifted back to their holdings in the exclusion zone because they hated living in urban flats. And the scientists working on the farm in the exclusion zone were not able to report a single deformity among the progeny of their breeding stock.

The consequences of these incidents have been routinely exaggerated. Thousands are regularly reported as having died in the Ukraine, Belorus and Russia, regardless of the evidence. The result has been a moratorium in the West on the building of nuclear power stations until recently when Finland decided to construct a fifth reactor.

Yet the official death toll at Chernobyl represents a mere four days fatal carnage on UK roads. It is roughly the number of lives of coal miners lost in British pits even in the safest of the last years of Britain as a major coal producer.

Nuclear energy is not a subject that can rely on rationality when it is being discussed. Thanks to the Sellafield nuclear fuel reprocessing and waste handling plant, the Irish - and not least their Prime Minister - believe the Irish Sea is the most radioactive in the world. This is, of course, stuff and nonsense.

In a debate in 2002 at University College, Dublin, I was able to persuade the students, if not Irish politicians, of this when I advised them that I had arrived fully irradiated. This was the result of an hour's flight from Heathrow during which I had absorbed four times the amount of radiation that I would do if I lunched every day for a year on fish from the Irish Sea. Why, I wondered, was the issue for debate not "That this House would close Sellafield" but that "This House would close all airports"?

The Nordic countries are also up in arms about Sellafield. Yet it has been shown that you would have to eat seven lobsters from their fjords in one go to ingest as much radioactivity as you would if you ate one Brazil nut.

Let us not forget either that the British medical profession, by harnessing radioactive materials to the diagnosis and treatment of disease, puts vastly more radioactivity into the atmosphere than the entire UK nuclear industry. But have you ever heard of a Green with a broken leg refusing an X-ray?

I don't expect rationality, least of all from our media, who have generally decided nuclear is a bad thing. Why should I when I personally know that, having poured you into a mould - in my case that of a fierce cross between Heathcliff and a pit bull terrier - they make you fit your cast at all times.

Another example of the irrationality is the view of nuclear waste which is portrayed as dangerous, a threat to human life and liable to blow up at any minute. In fact, the nuclear industry's approach to its waste products has been vindicated by 48 years' handling of it. It decided to store them to allow the radioactivity to decline before finally putting the higher-level radioactive material in a long-term depository.

We only have a so-called waste problem now because, unlike, for example, Finland and Sweden, we have yet to find a Government with the political courage to designate a site for a depository. There is no scientific, technical or financial problem in incarcerating it safely. Indeed, perhaps the sensible thing to do would be to shove it inside a robust concrete cave, cover it with soil and use the site as an artificial ski run.
By the year 2500 it would be no more harmful than the uranium in the ground from whence it came.

It might, of course, be wise to make the stored radioactive material retrievable since our descendants may well find a use for it, such as recycling it as nuclear fuel.

But I am getting ahead of myself in arguing why not nuclear? To recap, so far I have presented nuclear power as almost uniquely misrepresented - thanks partly to the failure of the nuclear industry and its scientists to correct false impressions.

The result is a worldwide determination to avoid the obvious answer to its problem - the need for vast and increasing amounts of clean energy - and find alternatives to nuclear. This is so in spite of new, safer, cheaper designs of reactor producing a tenth of the radioactive waste of current designs.

Unfortunately, the world is not going about its determination very cleverly. The USA rightly won't touch Kyoto with a bargepole since it excludes China, India and Africa. What is the point of the West applying itself to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions if major polluters of the present and certainly the future fall outside the global plan?

Frankly, Kyoto and the junkets which pass for serious summits on the environment let the American global warming sceptics, whatever the reason for their scepticism, off the hook by excluding whole continents or sub-continents.

However, Kyoto has given a boost to those who see renewable sources of energy and energy conservation as the means of saving the planet. It has certainly captured the heart of the British Government, which envisages powering the world's fourth largest economy on wind, reducing demand and vast amounts of imported gas at prices unknown. This only serves to show where the irrationality which lies behind so much global warming campaigning can take you.

In my view - and I have made sure the Government is aware of it - current British energy policy is irresponsible, incompetent and a danger to the nation's interests - one of which is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. If we are to rely on this strategy we can be sure we shan't just be uncompetitive; we shan't have an economy at all. In that way we should make a signal contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions!

That is not, of course, how it will work out. But we may have to undergo some pain before reality dawns.

Let us first examine renewables. In practice, as the Government's recent review has conceded, the only available renewable form of electricity, apart from fully-developed hydro, is wind power. I have consistently objected to wind on aesthetic environmental grounds. But there is a practical, economic case to be made against it, too.

The first is that wind power is intermittent. We get none when the wind doesn't blow or when it blows a gale so that the turbines have to be shut down. And we get none when we most need it - when the country is becalmed under an anti-cyclone in midwinter, leading to low temperatures. In practice, each wind turbine generates only a quarter of its theoretical capacity. This means that there has to be a spinning reserve of conventional power stations which greatly add to wind's already subsidised cost and greatly reduces its much-vaunted avoidance of greenhouse gases.

For this reason, there are engineering limits as to how much wind power the UK grid, however sophisticated and flexible it may be, can take. The Irish have just banned any more wind farms from connecting to their grid because they don't have enough stand-by capacity to cope with it.

It also follows that billions of pounds are going to have to be expended to reinforce the grid to carry wind power from remote hills and offshore sites to the population using it. It is, as the Irish and Danes have discovered, a very expensive way of avoiding greenhouse gases. A recent Royal Academy of Engineering study has shown that wind, taking account of the need for standby power, is about three times more expensive than the two cheapest options - gas and nuclear.

All the rest of the renewables and devices canvassed for an environmentally virtuous Britain - waves, tides, solar, photovoltaic cells, geothermal, biomass, carbon sequestration and hydrogen, that much vaunted replacement for petrol - are undeveloped or unproven or a gleam in the eye.

I take this jaundiced view of them not because I am pro-nuclear. My attitude has always been that if somebody can come up with a cleaner, cheaper, reliable and continuous alternative to nuclear, then let's have it. But none of these so-called alternatives are viable in the foreseeable future and hydrogen would need nuclear power to produce it in sufficient quantity.

The case for so-called renewables falls flat on its face when you consider the amount of land required to produce just 1,000MW of electricity - the output of an average UK conventional power station. And don't forget we need at least 55 1,000MW stations to keep Britain going at peak demand.

To generate just 1,000 MW - intermittently - wind requires an area equivalent to Dartmoor.

Waves require 30 miles of Salter's nodding ducks stretching from Liverpool to Fleetwood, with no guarantee that the ducks would deliver.

Solar - requires 1.5 times the size of Dartmoor, with the proviso that the DTI thinks solar impractical in our climate.

Biomass - ie wood - requires a forest the size of Wales.

Bio-oil - requires an area equivalent to the size of the Highlands of Scotland.

Bio-alcohol - requires the whole of Devon devoted to sugar beet; or the whole of Sussex and Kent devoted to potatoes; or the whole of Yorkshire devoted to corn; or the whole of the UK devoted to wheat.

Bio-gas: requires 800m chickens with regular digestions covering a third of Dartmoor, allowing for best husbandry practice of 10-11 chickens per square metre. And just imagine the stink!

Nuclear requires only an area equivalent to 10 soccer pitches for a single 1,000MW power station. It is environmentally benign on two counts - pollution and land requirement.

If renewables send people into global warming ecstasy, energy conservation makes them feel unutterably pious. It is perfectly true that technological improvements have secured and will continue to secure steadily more work for the same input of energy. But there is not the slightest evidence that outside a short, sharp crisis - met by temporarily acceptable prohibitions and otherwise politically unacceptable eye-watering price increases - energy conservation will deliver any reduction in demand.

As things stand, electricity demand increases by 1-1.6% a year. Last week, the Office of National Statistics was reported to be livid with the Department of Transport for suppressing figures showing an 85% increase in pollutants from aircraft since 1990 and a 59% rise from freight transport.

It is going to take excruciating price increases to reduce the British appetite for energy. And we know what happens every time the idea of relatively modest increases is proposed: a threat of the resumption of direct action which caused so much disruption a few years ago.

Of course, we might power Britain with gas as long as it lasts. But we shall have to import the bulk of it from unstable areas such as Russia, the Middle East and Algeria. We shall be at the end of the Continental pipeline with the French finger on the tap. And we haven't a clue how much it will cost in the future - except more - knowing that we already have a painful trade deficit.

The logic of this situation is that sooner or later we shall go nuclear - on grounds of security and reliability of supply, predictable affordability, overall economics, proven safety and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

Unfortunately, we have failed to face reality for so long now that nuclear can do nothing much to alleviate any supply problems we have in the next 10 years because of the decline in oil and gas reserves and environmental legislation against coal and oil electricity generation. It will take up to 10 years to secure planning permission for and build and commission a new nuclear plant.

Consequently, we shall be driven for the foreseeable future to import ever more expensive, if not necessarily unreliable, amounts of gas - gas which by now, after recent price increases, must be less competitive than nuclear.

We are, not to put too fine a point on it, in a real national pickle. We are perhaps in no worse pickle than the rest of Europe, apart from France which is 75% nuclear, where weak Governments, like ours, are either proposing to close down or allow nuclear to wither on the vine.

Meanwhile, not much is being done about global warming. In our case, greenhouse gas emissions have risen for three years running after the reductions achieved by burning more gas and less coal. Energy conservation, in so far as it is practised, is not damping demand. And renewables - ie wind power - development is behind schedule.

The issue is not if but when the nuclear reality dawns. The evidence is that it has dawned or re-dawned in Finland, Slovakia, China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Russia, the Ukraine, the site of Chernobyl, France and the USA where they are each building or planning to build new nuclear stations.

A referendum in Switzerland (36% nuclear) has agreed nuclear should continue, with older stations being replaced. In a recent poll 53% of Swedes supported the continued use of nuclear energy and its development and another 27% its use until the country's eleven reactors reach the end of their operational lives. Only17% wanted nuclear electricity generation to end. This is a remarkable reversal of the position in 2000. A Belgian government advisory body has pointed out that if proposals to close its seven nuclear units producing 60% of the country's electricity are implemented, it simply would not be able to it meet its carbon reduction commitments. There are even tensions in Germany, governed by a nuclear-closing Red/Green coalition.

And so it goes on - except in the UK, the pioneer of nuclear energy.

We may not be quite so hypocritical as Italy which shut down its two nuclear stations following Chernobyl to rely on imports of mainly nuclear power from France. But we in Britain are certainly not giving the moral lead that the world is perhaps entitled to expect of us for one simple reason: nuclear is in our economic, energy security, industrial, commercial and environmental self-interest.

And soon no amount of scaremongering will gainsay it.

You wait until the lights go out - as indeed they may because of the UK's so-called energy policy.

In a week when we are remembering the cost of having to invade Europe to end Nazism, I think we should also remember the avoidable cost of 1930s' appeasement. I hope that 60 years hence my grandchildren are not inviting our descendants to remember the avoidable cost of lily-livered and anti-social Green appeasement.

Ladies and gentlemen: I trust that you now feel as exasperated as I do in having to answer the question "And why shouldn't we go nuclear?" Of course we should - and now.

What is more we could if our Government had the courage to say that nuclear power is vital to our long-term energy security and, as a token of its seriousness, set about finding a site for a waste depository and indicated that new stations should be built on existing nuclear sites to replace those that are ageing or have already been closed. It is sadly in our nature never to buckle to until we are nearly overwhelmed by a crisis.