Britain is bucking the post-Fukishima trend and has just signed the contract on the first new nuclear power station in over twenty years, as a “first step” towards replacing the 18% of our energy mix which will come offline in the early 2020s. Somehow, the project has been made even more controversial than your typical nuclear power station.
Firstly, the station will be owned by EDF (a French firm 85% owned by its government) and the bulk of the finance will be provided by a Chinese state-owned investment firm. Secondly, our government has avoided the massive cash subsidises that characterise nuclear developments, and has instead opted to guarantee a price for electricity generated by the station. This makes the station a safe private sector investment, but with the guaranteed cost some 200% of current wholesale prices, this means a multibillion subsidy not from taxpayers, but from billpayers.
Oh, and did I mention that it will continue to spew out ultratoxic nuclear waste (albeit in lower quantities) when we still haven’t worked out what to do with a 60 year backlog of the stuff?
This isn’t an article on the problems with nuclear power as a whole: I’ve made my opposition to nuclear fission known, but I support research and experimentation into the safer and more cost effective process of nuclear fusion (look it up if you’d like to know more. There is a lot of good information on the topic). No, my concern today is about how ministers have gone about pursuing new nuclear capacity. I do have a few safety concerns: anything dealing with such radiation which has the power to render hundreds of square miles uninhabitable strikes me as dangerous, no matter how many safety features are introduced. There will always be pressure to cut corners, there will always be terrorists, and there is always the risk of unforseen disaster.
The risks to safety, such as they are, will be worse with foreign owners. Put simply, the sense of responsibility and duty cannot be quite as deep if the owners and management live hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away. I’m not saying that the Chinese state will willingly endanger Britain, but there will be an inevitable, subconscious effect. We used to accept that there were critical parts of national infrastructure to which foriegn ownership would be unsafe. I don’t know what happened to that notion, but anything radioactive surely belongs in such a category.
Even then, suppose that a British firm, SSE for example, had the money and the will to operate the power station. Even more surreally, suppose that the risk of radiation leakage or accident could be reduced to zero. We’re still being let down, as our energy suppliers will have to buy this nuclear power at twice the going rate. Yes, we might not be paying for this as taxpayers, but we are paying a de facto tax through our energy bills. And as any 15 year old GCSE Economics student will tell you, the poor bear a heavier burden under indirect taxation than under upfront taxes. And that the true guaranteed cost of British nuclear power.
