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Last week I have attended a couple of different events on the subject of nuclear power, and how to deliver it faster in the UK. Since coming to power, the new Labour Government has indicated it has different views on energy than its predecessor, and while details are as yet scarce, it is clear that Labour intends to base the GB power system on wind and solar, with an emphasis on wind. In terms of nuclear it has said little, but there are reports that Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has asked officials to review future nuclear plans, and in particular the prospects for the 24 GW nuclear target and the plans for a GW scale reactor at Wylfa. Backtracking on either would be a serious error.
This is worrying – the time for reviews has long since passed, and it is time to get on with building. The consequences of failure to do so could be severe.
The answer most definitely is not “blowing in the wind”
Miliband loves wind. He loves it so much he filmed himself playing a ukelele under a wind turbine, singing that song. He waxes lyrical about how “home grown” clean energy will replace fossil fuels, a noble-sounding ambition, but one which fails to stand up to scrutiny. In fact, the term “home-grown” was used 10 times in the founding statement for Great British Energy.
“Our country faces huge challenges. More than 2 years on from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, families and businesses continue to pay the price for Britain’s energy insecurity. Bills remain hundreds of pounds higher than before the energy crisis began and are expected to rise again soon. At the same time, we are confronted by the climate crisis all around us, not a future threat but a present reality, and there is an unmet demand for good jobs and economic opportunities all across Britain.
In 2024, the answers to all these challenges point in the same direction: investing in clean energy at speed and scale. In an unstable world, the only way to guarantee our energy security and protect billpayers permanently is to speed up the transition away from fossil fuels and towards home-grown clean energy,”– Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero
The statement goes on to claim that “unlike fossil fuels, the advantage of home-grown clean energy is that it is not priced and sold on international markets and controlled by other states”.
None of this is true. As we will see from the charts below, when wind output is low, which it inevitably is from time to time, Britain is forced to import electricity, at prices determined by the international markets, and has to increase its consumption of gas for electricity generation, using gas prices on international markets.
It is also impossible to separate international energy prices from the cost of building new renewable generation as evidenced by the significant increase in the subsidy prices in the AR4 and recent AR6 Contracts for Difference auction rounds. And many of the materials used in delivering these new renewables, particularly solar panels and the rare earth magnets that are essential for wind turbines, are not only produced in China, but their markets are dominated by China. International gas prices are not “controlled by other states” but the supply chains for some of the components needed for renewables certainly are.
That a reliance on renewables embeds a reliance on energy imports can be demonstrated with the aid of some simple charts of the GB generation mix.
This was a low wind day. Low wind lasted all day, far longer than the 1-4 hours (average 1.5) duration of batteries. Coal was needed for most of the day with pumped hydro running in the evening peak. Interconnector imports were close to maximum capacity during the day and gas generation was high.
Consecutive low wind days, clearly far exceeding the capability of batteries to provide a backup for wind generation. Again coal is needed, in this case as solar declines into the evening and there is a small contribution from pumped hydro. The use of gas is reduced by the presence of solar.
Another low wind day, but it is striking the extent to which solar output has reduced in just six weeks since late July. Together the maximum contribution from wind and solar was just 4.5 GW. This was a Saturday so peak demand was lower than during the week. Pumped hydro, electricity imports and gas all make significant contributions.
This chart from late January demonstrates the extremely low contribution of solar in the winter, on a low wind day. The maximum contribution from wind and solar on this day was just 2.7 GW. This chart is also a striking demonstrator of the negligible contribution of solar in the winter months both in terms of magnitude (bare MWs) and duration (c 7 hours). Electricity imports remain strong but the market is dominated by gas-fired generation. Without this it would have been impossible to meet demand at any time during the day. Without it, backouts would have been guaranteed.
It is clear from these charts that it is impossible to build a robust and reliable electricity system that is both built on wind power and does not rely on imports: when wind output is low we rely heavily on both electricity imports and gas imports to burn in gas fired power stations. Labour’s plans to reduce North Sea gas production means this gas has to be imported so when wind output is low large parts of the electricity used on the GB grid are imported rather than “home grown”.
The case for nuclear power
There are three core ambitions that have been identified in relation to long-term energy policy: decarbonisation, affordability and security. Until the invasion of Ukraine, energy security had been neglected for quite some time with almost all the policy focus being on decarbonisation and cost. However, following the start of the war, it quickly became apparent that energy security was not only important but a priority – countries delayed decarbonisation ambitions and invested in new fossil fuel infrastructure particularly in European countries which replaced pipeline gas from Russia with LNG through newly built floating regas terminals.
Affordability also became a major consideration since the shortages caused by the removal of Russian pipeline gas from the European market, along with the asymmetric recovery from covid where demand recovered faster than supplies, pushed up prices in late 2021, and made energy unaffordable for both households and businesses. Large subsidies were offered to support both.
However, some of the lessons taken from the crisis were the wrong ones. Yes, a gas shortage was the first order cause of the price spikes observed from late 2021, but these were unaffordable because over the previous 15 years, households had been burdened with £billions in costs resulting from the deployment of intermittent renewables. These costs are both direct (subsidies and curtailment fees) and indirect (the capacity market back-up scheme, higher network costs due to the need to connect low energy density generation and higher balancing costs resulting from the real-time intermittency of weather-based generation).
Renewables are also not especially good for the environment. They may generate electricity without creating carbon dioxide emissions through their operation, but they create a lot of carbon dioxide emissions and other forms of both air and water pollution in their construction. The low energy density of wind and solar means a lot more infrastructure is needed to meet demand compared with conventional generation. This is rarely considered by green energy cheerleaders.
Fortunately there is a generation technology which is both carbon dioxide-free in operation, has very high energy density, and is not intermittent: nuclear power.
The common objections to nuclear energy are cost, safety and waste. But when the full costs to the consumer are properly considered on a firm power basis, nuclear is cheaper than wind and solar, and in terms of deaths per unit of electricity generated, nuclear and solar are by far the safest forms of generation with fatality rates so low as to be within the margin of statistical error.
Even the waste problem is much smaller than people think – the main issue is with legacy waste and while that is indeed a challenge, the volume of high level waste is small. According to the Nuclear Industry Association, the volume of high level waste from all nuclear activity in the UK ever, amounts to one dishwasher tablet’s worth per person. The Canadian Nuclear Association calculated that if a person relied on nuclear power for all of their energy needs across their lifetime, the resulting waste would fit into a drinks can. This is tiny compared with the volume of other types of highly toxic industrial waste generated in the economy every year, and the processes for handling and storing this was are well established and safe. At some point a long-term geological storage site will be identified and developed, but there is no urgency given the small amounts of new nuclear waste being generated each year.
It’s a bit depressing, however, that the nuclear industry fails to deliver these messages clearly. At the APPG for Energy Studies (PGES) meeting on nuclear power this week, speakers gave rather convoluted answers to questions of cost and waste, with some rambling about grid connection costs and water ingress issues in possible geological waste storage depositories. Industry insiders need to be able to give quick, snappy and memorable answers: nuclear is cheaper than renewables when the all-in costs to consumers are considered, nuclear is safer than any generation technology other than solar, and with very small volumes produced each year, waste is a much smaller challenge than people might think.
Controlling the regulators
The real issue is that regulators have been allowed to become barriers to rather than enablers of nuclear power. As nuclear was de-prioritised by policymakers, regulators were largely unaccountable for helping to deliver new nuclear, and allowed to behave in a hyper conservative way – according to EDF, the Office for Nuclear Regulation (“ONR”) required some 7,000 changes to the EPR design that was approved in France and Finland. Arguably, the French nuclear regulator has far more experience than its British counterpart in regulating the nuclear industry so it is both curious and depressing that the ONR was allowed to behave in this way. While I’m no fan of the EPR, there is no justification for the ONR to cause so much trouble over the reactor design.
Another example of out-of-control regulation relates to environmental permitting. I’m told the Environmental Impact Assessment for Sizewell C ran to thousands of pages when really it should have been a very brief statement to the effect of “about the same as for Sizewell A and Sizewell B next door”. Britain’s environmental regulators regulate from the bottom up, on a site by site basis. They have no mandate to look at the big picture. Nuclear has very high energy density, so a small geographic area can produce massively more electricity than an equivalent area given over to renewables. On a national level, the environment might be better served if (say) the newt population was decimated on the nuclear site if it was then allowed to thrive everywhere else, with everywhere else being bigger and resulting in more newts overall (in fact, Sizewell has newt ladders so the critters aren’t decimated, but the point stands).
It is hoped that the Planning and Infrastructure Bill announced in the King’s Speech will help, particularly in accelerating the process for Development Consent Orders, and there are nuclear supporters in Parliament working on the Bill so the scope for hope is real. But other changes are needed. The ONR currently reports to the Department for Work and Pensions – this was to create a “separation of duties” so that nuclear regulators would not be pressured in terms of say energy security concerns. But such pressures are actually necessary – if premature closure of the existing reactors or delayed opening of new reactors contributes to the risk of blackouts which in turn carries a risk of death, then the nuclear regulator should be mindful of this. ONR should be held responsible for all the consequences of its actions, not just those directly relating to radiation, and this would be helped if it was part of the Energy Ministry.
Saying nuclear is too expensive and takes too longs is a lazy objection and without it there is no current route to a reliable, decarbonised electricity system. Nuclear is not cheap – although arguably it is cheaper than intermittent renewables when the all-in cost to the consumer is properly calculated – but net zero itself is not going to be cheap. However, nuclear does not have to be as expensive as it currently is, nor does it need to take as long.
The Government needs to stop searching for easy answers and quit its wishful thinking. A reliable home-grown clean energy system can only be delivered with the inclusion of a meaningful amount of nuclear power. Otherwise we will be condemned to either an un-reliable system or one which is propped up with the very imports Labour says it wants to avoid.
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