16 January 2008The Guardian
High level radioactive nuclear waste at Sellafield nuclear plant. Photograph: AFPTwo of the UK's chief green advisers yesterday launched a ferocious attack on government saying the national fight against climate change will be hindered by the decision to encourage nuclear power.
Sir Jonathon Porritt, the chairman of the government's Sustainable Development Commission (SDC), speaking for the first time since the announcement last week, said that responding to climate change with nuclear power was a "technological megafix".
"What is disturbing is that government is failing to understand that the more urgent that dealing with climate change becomes, the less relevant that nuclear power is. Solutions have to be found on waste, cost, and decommissioning. They have not been found on any of those issues. It reveals how poor is the understanding by government of the importance of climate change," he said.
He was joined by the SDC's chief economist, Professor Tim Jackson, who said the decision to opt for nuclear power was "a blatant failure of moral vision".
Jackson accused the government of misrepresenting the commission: "The government claims that it and the SDC see eye to eye on nuclear proliferation. This is disingenuous nonsense," he writes in today's Society Guardian.
Porritt said that the whole nuclear consultation process was about justifying a decision which Tony Blair had previously taken on strategic grounds. "It's a shame. I do not feel that they have listened to the arguments."
"The government response [to climate change] should not be in technological fixes. It should be in transforming society.... decentralising and decarbonising the economy. The Labour government has very little interest in these approaches. Pulling a technological megafix, like nuclear power, out of the hat is easier from a political point of view but it misses the essence of climate change which is transforming people's lives."
Porritt said it was "utterly scandalous" that the government had also announced it was not able to meet its targets for cutting fuel poverty. "It has dropped those targets because it has failed to apply itself to energy efficiency," he said.
Last night Greenpeace accused the government of providing covert subsidies to give the industry the support it needs. "The white paper openly admits the government will have to provide extra money if its cost estimates are wrong. Nuclear companies will be able to cap their liabilities, leaving the taxpayer exposed if estimates for dealing with waste change. The government admits that the public will pick up the liabilities for decommissioning and waste if the money is not available", said the group's director, John Sauven.
The pressure group declined to say yesterday whether it intended to challenge the government in the courts over its nuclear consultation, but said it was impossible to estimate how much it would cost to decommission the reactors.
"The cost of doing this, at this stage, is impossible to estimate. The length of time between starting a new nuclear plant and eventually putting the waste into a geological repository could well be over 150 years. Any discount rate or estimate on what costs might be in 2170 is pie in the sky.
The New Economics Foundation also said the the government was "fixing the market".
"Nuclear power will not survive on its own in the marketplace. The government will have to use voodoo economics to underwrite new capacity. The only beneficiaries of this decision are the handful of big energy companies," said policy director, Andrew Simms.
Other hidden subsidies not included in the white paper could be the cost of adapting transmission lines from any new plants which are expected to be considerably larger than existing plants. Security and transporting waste fuel which can run into millions of pounds a year would also come from the public purse.
The government has repeatedly said that the private sector will be responsible for replacing nuclear capacity, initiating, funding, constructing and operating new nuclear plants and will have to cover the costs of decommissioning and their full share of long-term waste management costs.
But opposition MPs last night said the government had not been able to give a cast-iron guarantee that taxpayers will not have to subsidise the costs of nuclear in the future.
"This was a great big signal to the industry that the government will see it right. It is giving guarantees and there is a price tag. There is no way you can have an energy policy with any degree of uncertainty," said Steve Webb, the Liberal Democrat spokesman on the environment.
