Urgent rethink on the nuclear option

The Sunday Times
March 15, 2009
Ian Fells

ON October 17, 1956, the Queen threw a switch to connect Calder Hall nuclear power station to the grid. It was the world’s first commercial nuclear power station and had been built from scratch in three years. It continued to operate well for the next 47 years, and became the first of a series of 11 Magnox nuclear power stations.
Next year, the last of those will close, leaving Britain at the mercy of fossil fuel, much of it imported, to meet a growing demand for electrical power. The Magnox stations and their successors — a generation of bigger, more modern pressurised-water reactors (PWRs) — were a triumph for sophisticated, British engineering. Sizewell B PWR was built and opened in 1995. It was intended to be the first of a series of 10 PWR stations but it was to be the last one to be built in the UK — even though, at its opening, nuclear power was providing a crucial 20% of UK electricity.
The writing was already on the wall when Labour came to power in 1997. Old Labour had long had a hate relationship with civil nuclear power, stemming from the CND marches to Aldermaston when the quite different roles of nuclear fission in weaponry and the civil nuclear programme “atoms for peace” were inextricably confused.
This was made manifest in the white paper of 2003, which was strongly influenced by the anti- nuclear Margaret Beckett (Defra), Patricia Hewitt (DTI) and Peter Hain (energy minister for a few weeks — one of a chaotic succession of ministers in recent years), and concluded that Britain did not need nuclear power.

For the past decade we have buried our heads in the sand, hoping that North Sea oil and gas — now in terminal decline — and a sound industry, constructed by the Central Electricity Generating Board in its heyday before privatisation, would meet our needs. The awful reality that we will lose a third of our generating capacity over the next decade has only just begun to dawn — and it has to be replaced.
The market will only provide new gas-fired stations or, if they are very heavily subsidised, offshore wind generators. There are serious problems of security of supply with both these options. So, with a complete volte face, the prime minister now wants as much nuclear power as possible.
It may be too late. From the closure of the Dounreay Fast Reactor, the most advanced of its kind in the world in the 1980s, to shilly-shallying over the Sizewell C and Hinkley C stations, recent years have been marked by short-sightedness and vacillation.
Perhaps the most staggering piece of ineptitude on the part of the government was selling off Westinghouse (one of only five companies worldwide that could provide turn-key construction of new nuclear power stations) to Toshiba for $5 billion (£3.6 billion).
The company had been part of British Nuclear Fuels but, under pressure from Hewitt, who as industry secretary was determined to divest government of any nuclear liabilities, BNFL was forced to put Westinghouse on the market.
Now that Britain has belatedly realised that we do need nuclear power after all and that windmills, energy efficiency and a few gas-fired power stations will not save the day, new nuclear power stations must be built. We may well have left it too late and we have lost the ability in the UK to build them. So we must rely on EDF, Westinghouse and others to do it for us.
A queue is forming, though, and we have to join it. Some of our companies will be employed as sub-contractors, but it is rather like the crumbs thrown to industry in Third World countries when power stations are being built there. A sad comedown for a one-time world leader in nuclear engineering.
Ian Fells is emeritus professor of energy conversion at Newcastle University