From yesterday’s Observer:

In fact, Sellafield is a classic illustration of the failure of British industry. We were pioneers of nuclear power but in our desire to build our own atomic weapons, failed abysmally when it came to developing and managing our own civil reactors and reprocessing plants.

As a result, we have been left with a multibillion-pound clean-up bill and the prospect of buying either American or French reactors for our next generation nuclear plants. The lesson of Sellafield is not so much that nuclear power is dangerous but that Britain seems incapable of implementing any long-term engineering plan that comes its way, from high-speed trains to wind turbines or rocket launchers.

Every now and then, I have these little ‘technology epiphanies’. I can’t think of a better phrase but if you’ve ever marvelled at the ability to send email, talk over the internet, find an obscure fact in seconds, or order miscellaneous goods from far-off places, no doubt you’ll know what I mean. The internet lets you do some absolutely amazing things.

In the Economist this week, they suggest that the follow-up to this revolution in information technology and network communications will be found in wireless devices. With cheap small wireless chips, devices can communicate between themselves enabling a range of new products and services (e.g. how about a mousetrap that notifies you when it’s caught a mouse – or, alternatively, that the mouse ate all the cheese).

Apart from the Oyster card in London, I haven’t really seen much of this technology myself but the appeal of wireless technology, even in a fairly simple application, is clear. Today for example, I’m writing this post on a bus, stuck in traffic heading out of London. Static wifi has obviously been around for a few years but there’s something about having access while you’re on the move that is just amazing. This isn’t very exciting to those who spend a lot of time on trains in the UK but it’s the first time I’ve had a chance to try it out and I’m smitten!

The other technology I was impressed by today is on the energy front. This BBC story and video describes a giant solar concentrating generator in Spain. Using thousands of mirrors to focus sunlight, it heats water and drives a steam turbine. I think these types of plants have existed for years in the US but the scale and sophistication of this new facility – and the plans to build more larger facilities – make this particularly impressive.

Can I just say that £6.8bn would buy a heck of a lot of solar panels? I realise there are all sorts of likely benefits for physics and materials research but the main headline about the new investment in nuclear fusion is certainly all about the theoretical energy potential:

“Take the lithium from the battery of a single laptop computer, add half a bathtub of water, and it can give 200,000 kilowatt hours of electricity – the same as 70 tonnes of coal. That’s enough to power one person in the UK for 30 years… This says to me that you have to give it a go. You’ve just got to give this thing a crack!”

Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith, head of the UK’s fusion research programme in Oxford Today

Sounds great but others aren’t so enthusiastic, saying the idea is “as discouraging as it is expensive”. Even if you listen to the most optimistic proponents, they say it might work in 50 years time (provided oil prices make the economics attractive). In the meantime, it’s still consuming more electricity than it generates.

It seems that fusion research in the past has been plagued by “unrealistic expectations regarding our abilities”. Doesn’t this sound familiar? It’s just like electricity from nuclear fission going from being too cheap to meter to costing the taxpayer £70bn (and counting) just to clean up the mess.

I would love to see a full cost-benefit analysis comparing the investment of this money in fusion and microgeneration. Any takers?

Tony Blair is giving a big speech tonight to representatives of British industry and is taking the opportunity to less-than-subtly hint that nuclear power is back on the agenda. The reaction from green groups has been predictably critical and it’s certainly easy to be cynical about whether or not the Energy Review was a done-deal from day one.

The Number 10 website has a few key slides (PDF) to back up the speech and quite rightly they should scare a prime minister into action. There is going to be a large supply side gap once aging nuclear plants close and increased dependence on foreign gas supplies isn’t a great idea either. But this gap could much smaller, if not zero, if more effort was placed on the demand side. Instead the graphs show a ‘if we build it, they will come’ type logic, suggesting that demand will be x and policy must build appropriate supply.

Indeed, only after nuclear and renewables does Blair’s speech mention even energy efficiency – this is completely backwards. Demand side should come first. For example, projects like the 40% House show that the energy and carbon gaps can be all but closed through the use of existing energy-efficiency and microgeneration technologies. Whether or not government still decides to replace existing nuclear power stations is a valid question (which will probably get completely lost in the upcoming media furore), but it should only be considered after a serious effort to reduce demand. After all, “waste not, want not”.

Edit: A great interview at the Guardian with an ex-minister about the importance of demand side management and some great insight into the government’s poor grip on the economics of nuclear:

“The reality is that economically the risks are great and the returns are low. No private-sector company is going to take on the long-term risks, the costs of decommissioning, the storage, reprocessing and the responsibility for the waste.”

There’s an interesting article in the Guardian this morning about the budget sounding better than it actually is for microgeneration and sustainable energy. The general impression is that the amounts being put forward are not enough: Jeremy Leggett from Solar Century suggests it needs to be “billions, not millions”. While this may be hyperbole, the government certainly could be doing more on climate change and this discrepancy makes the PM’s recent claims that he wants a “technological revolution” to help solve the problem sound a bit disingenuous.

If technology is the way forward, there are arguably two options. First you can do like Germany, US, and Japan have done for their PV industries and provide support to encourage the market to adopt a current technology. Market demand can encourage innovation but more importantly, this approach gives the benefit of practical experience in installing and operating these technologies (e.g. getting the regulatory framework right and so on). The second route seems to be what the UK is following, by providing £1bn for a new energy R&D institute (which some argue may be largely for the benefit of nuclear).

Which approach will yield better results? I think that the market approach is the best way forward, allowing technologies to develop and evolve alongside the needs of consumers. In contrast, designing a revolutionary technology in a lab and trying to plop it into society is very difficult. Researchers like Elizabeth Shove have noted that although “deeply flawed”, policy makers often hold the belief that technologies can simply be created and then transferred to an adoring public.¹ The UK approach of combining R&D with small market incentives might work, but I think it will take much longer for any results to be seen.

¹ Shove, E. (1998) “Gaps, barriers and conceptual chasms: theories of technology transfer and energy in buildings” Energy Policy 26(15): 1105-1112.

The Sustainable Development Commission, the government’s advisory body on sustainable development issues, released a report yesterday that says nuclear power is not the answer to the UK’s energy security and climate change problems.

I highly recommend listening to the mp3 at the bottom of the page which is an interview with the SDC’s chairman, Jonathan Porritt (direct link – warning, 10MB mp3). It presents the pros and cons of nuclear very clearly and fairly, simply saying that the disadvantages outweigh the advantages. The recommended alternative is that government work harder to implement the strategy outlined in 2003 white paper and focus on energy efficiency, renewables and microgeneration. As Mr. Porritt says, the policy record since 2003 has been mediocre at best and the danger is that:

If they [government] continues to play around with things as they are now, it is possible that an energy gap will loom at some stage in the future.

Nuclear won’t fill this gap – it doesn’t provide solutions for heat and transport, only electricity, and even then it may be 20 years until these stations are constructed and their benefits realised.

The message of the report is essentially the same as John Gummer’s talk last week. There is no easy answer to energy policy and it will take coordinated and dedicated leadership to deliver effective solutions. I wonder if government has it in them or if they’ll go for the false ‘easy’ answer?

The Office of the Deputy Prime Mininster recently published its final report on low or zero carbon energy sources and controversially concludes that no LZC technologies are cost-effective and hence they should not be considered for mandatory inclusion in part L of the building regulations.

The website provides full details on the calculations used and you can even download the spreadsheet to play around with the figures for yourself. While I don’t really agree with their numbers (electricity prices not going to rise in the next 25 years?!), at least the numbers are there for inspection. Points scored for openness in government, right?

Maybe not. The report also states:

It is recommended that the cost-effectiveness assessments are not made available as part of any consultation exercise since they have served their purpose within this report and could easily be misinterpreted outside the context this purpose.

In other words, any debates about possible policies based on these calculations shouldn’t be able to challenge the underlying figures. Very disappointing – the UK desperately needs a serious debate about low energy housing and this report seems to designed to ensure as little change as possible.

Sir David King has an article in today’s Guardian where he defends his decision to back nuclear. Somewhat oddly given the article’s headline, he only briefly discusses nuclear and mainly focuses on the problem of climate change, stabilization levels, and emissions trading. Interestingly though, he says:

I emphatically do not believe in direct government subsidies for nuclear energy. (emphasis added)

So does that mean he no longer supports an electricity levy to support nuclear? Does the government paying insurance and waste costs count as a “direct” subsidy?

There were some interesting articles on the nuclear debate in today’s Observer for those who are interested:

• Grasping the nuclear nettle by the Energy Minister, Malcolm Wicks, gives the basic government position saying that it’s time to revisit civil nuclear but the forthcoming review will be open-minded – “The answer could be yes. But it could be no.”
• ‘We have no other option’, the pro-nuclear angle from former energy minster Brian Wilson interestingly points out the 62% of Britains would support nuclear “if it was part of a strategy that also included increased reliance on renewables” – in other words, pointing out that the question may not be either or.
• ‘Who puts up the cash?’ by Prof Gordon McKerron, chair of the Committee for Radioactive Waste Management. A great read with the following quote – “The risk for the nuclear industry is that if it argues for 10,000 MW or nothing, it may get nothing.”

The Economist this week was saying that Blair has a tendency to be over-eager in accepting new ideas and promoting them (Bagehot). But if he’s feeling patient, there appear to be many around who are ready for a frank discussion before concluding what technology or technologies are needed to secure the UK’s energy supply and address climate concerns.

I’ve recently been conducting some telephone interviews for my research, talking with representatives from across the microgeneration industry. The general outlook was pretty positive but one respondent said he was nervous that microgeneration might get lost in the shuffle once everyone gets “totally sidetracked by this nuclear debate”. Talk about timing – that same week the BBC was packed with stories about the UK’s future energy supply gap, the roots of the problem, and most controversially rumours that Blair is `convinced’ on nuclear.

Say what you want about the rights and wrongs of nuclear power, it’s obvious why this is coming up the agenda now. The recent cold weather here in the UK has had everyone talking about energy security and as it happens, the world is meeting in Montreal to discuss climate change – on which, incidentally neither the UK nor the EU are doing particularly well on. Let alone Canada.

But back to the main point, the nuclear option is being reviewed now because it’s clearly crunch time for UK energy policy. There are legitimate concerns about energy security and environmental issues that need to be addressed and nuclear may well be part of the solution.

Unlike the last round of nuclear though, the government has made it clear that the technology must now stand on its own two feet. Well that’s great but I’ll believe it when I see it. There are continuing criticisms that the costs of nuclear are greatly underestimated and the government continues to underwrite the costs of waste management. Decisions made with these parameters don’t sound very, well, economic. As if to inadvertantly prove this point, the government’s chief scientist has recently called for a new levy on energy bills to pay for any new nuclear stations. This is exactly what Germany does to pay for renewables in their country and something that UK government has repeatedly resisted here as a `market distortion’.

This whole thing seems a bit like the evolution/intelligent design (ID) debate in the US. There, opponents to the teaching of ID in biology class have said if ID is a science, then it must follow the scientific method and its theories verified experimentally. In other words, the same set of rules must be used when comparing two alternatives. The same goes for nuclear in the UK: if we need it, fine. But the criteria of what is or is not economic should be equally applied to all alternatives.