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.
