The future of nuclear power is quite literally a matter of life and death - of whether the industry lives or whether it dies. Louise Tickle reports
A national controversy is raging and the blood is up. When the government's Energy Review was announced by Tony Blair on 29 November 2005, those for and against a new generation of nuclear reactors girded their loins, marshalled their evidence and have since been positioning their arguments across every media outlet that will provide them with a battlefield.The UK's current energy policy does not propose building any new nuclear generation capacity. With the launch of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) last April, the emphasis has been on knocking down existing facilities and cleaning up the debris. But increasingly urgent warnings that global warming is speeding up climate change at a rate that puts the earth's entire ecosystem at risk has clearly focused the government's mind.
Generating electricity in nuclear power stations emits far smaller volumes of greenhouse gases than burning fossil fuels. So the just-launched Energy Review - which will examine all the options to secure the country's power supply while reducing carbon emissions over the coming century - offers a beacon of hope to a nuclear industry that believed it was entering a period of terminal decline.
There is of course a strong Green lobby vociferously making the case that nuclear generation is far from clean or cheap and cannot be the answer to climate change. Inevitably set against them is a well-funded nuclear lobby eager to start building new reactors, who are saying precisely the opposite.
However, whether the government decides that nuclear is or isn't the future, there comes the moment of considering what impact that decision will have on the nuclear sector in the North West.
The region has six nuclear facilities: Sellafield, Calder Hall, Capenhurst, Drigg, Springfields and Windscale. Chester-based enriched uranium manufacturer Urenco (Capenhurst) is ranked at 40 in our Top 500 and British Nuclear Sellafield ranks as the top company in the North West for overseas sales.
Of the 40,000 jobs the industry provides nationally 23,000 are in the North West and half of those are in Cumbria. That represents a significant level of specialist expertise, not to mention many thousands of families whose livelihoods depend on the sector.
At the Northwest Regional Development Agency (NWDA), head of corporate support Patrick White explains that the agency's planning to date has not been predicated on any nuclear new build. However, he defines three drivers for the industry over the coming decades. The first is decommissioning; this is already taking place and will continue for a long time to come. The second is waste management; this will have to happen, but the decision as to how the UK will deal with its stores of high and intermediate-level waste has yet to be announced. Finally there is the possibility of new-build nuclear reactors.
Even just taking decommissioning into account says White, the employment picture is far from discouraging in the short and medium term. "The NDA will be spending around a billion pounds a year in the North West until 2015. Then it will decline to £3200m a year by 2035. The idea is that the job will be effectively done by 2100," he says.
"Another way of looking at that is that it represents at least a generation of work. The chairman of the NDA has said publicly that they would like to have people involved for the duration of their working life."
The NWDA's modelling predicts that there will be only a minimal loss of jobs in west Cumbria up until 2015. From 2015 the reduction will be more significant, with just 4,000 jobs remaining by 2040.
The industry has recognised that to make the most of new job opportunities in decommissioning, workers in the nuclear sector will have to be helped to adapt.
Tony Price, director of Cleanup at British Nuclear Group, says that "as the operational side of things comes to an end, we are retraining and reskilling people. In just the last few months we've moved 100 people from nuclear operations into nuclear cleanup. The unions and the workforce are behind it."
The skills being developed to retrain a workforce specialising in decommissioning is a valuable service that the North West could export. And demolishing nuclear facilities will also create work for a large number of associated industries.
"Taking facilities out of operation means decontaminating systems and plant, knocking them down and handling the waste," says Price. "There's going to be a heck of a lot of concrete and half a million tonnes of steel, so we're looking at the support industries that can deal with these products."
Price is an optimistic pragmatist. "Nothing lasts forever," he states calmly, "and if we can take those opportunities to up-skill people and help them adapt to change, that's what we should be aiming for. For the people affected in the industry, I think there's been some apprehension, but I think they're now starting to see the opportunities."
So much then for out with the old. What about in with the new?
There is no longer any serious debate about the need to mitigate global warming. To build or not to build more nuclear power stations in order to do it is now the crucial question. But behind that question lies a bitter debate about whether producing electricity from new-generation reactors really can help to slow climate change. And the stakes are high, because the future of the planet hangs in the balance.
But it is unlikely that the big players in the nuclear business, or even politicians, are motivated entirely by altruism. Potentially billions of pounds of research and contracting money are involved, and businesses that saw their markets declining could be rejuvenated if the government gives the go-ahead to nuclear new-build.
But, Dave Colman, coordinator of Manchester's Friends of the Earth (FoE) says that research into the pros and cons of new reactors shows that nuclear generation does not make environmental sense.
"The main reason that nuclear power isn't the answer to climate change is that it represents such a small proportion of what we use," he says. "Even if we doubled the proportion, we would only replace about 8 per cent of our greenhouse gas emissions and we need to do far more than that to have a meaningful effect on climate change."
Even if government decided to build tens of nuclear reactors, by the time they were operational, notes Colman, the period during which we could make a significant difference to global warming would be long gone.
"Most estimates on how bad climate change is have been overly optimistic so far," he explains. "At some point we are going to reach a tipping point in the chemistry of our weather and, if human activity goes too far, it's believed that we would restabilise again with a six degree increase in temperature."
Scientists don't yet know when that tipping point would be reached, but FoE says that within 15 years we could have warmed the planet to the level that would mean there was no going back. And given that it takes around 15 years to get a reactor operational from scratch, not a single watt of nuclear energy would have been created by the time the temperature could be irreversibly on the rise.
There is also an issue regarding the carbon emissions generated by building and decommissioning reactors. These emissions - the carbon-cost of using energy to generate energy - do not form part of the calculations cited by the industry in auditing the carbon emitted per watt of electricity generated. Added to this, the world's best uranium ores are in limited supply and the fossil fuels it will take to extract and enrich poorer quality ores as the better ones are used up will mean that there is a still a carbon penalty involved in running a nuclear reactor.
Even on the jobs front, it seems, nuclear doesn't cut it for Colman.
"I'd argue that the nuclear industry hasn't generated many jobs relative to the investment that goes into it," he says.
"In the North West in particular we have a fantastic wind resource; wind generates two or three times as much employment as nuclear and those jobs are spread across the North West."
Economically, the industry also has to battle public anxiety, not only about the intrinsic dangers of nuclear generation, but also cynicism following the billions of pounds of tax money that have bankrolled failing nuclear generation business models and bailed out bankrupt nuclear companies time and time again.
The nuclear industry, however, has changed a lot since its inception five decades ago, says Fred Shiel, chairman of the North West branch of the British Nuclear Energy Society. Government would not be expected to stump up the required start-up costs or give handouts to indebted businesses this time around.
"The economics of nuclear generation are different now," he explains. "Nuclear is the cheapest form of generation in the US, Japan and Korea when you look at the whole life cost. That includes decommissioning." He does acknowledge that the industry would like government to stabilise energy prices to encourage investors, but maintains that subsidy would not be asked for or required.
These days, a reactor would be unlikely to be a UK design - specialist international companies provide kits that are then constructed on site.
"A lot of the manufacture would be local and a lot of the smaller systems would be done in the UK," says Shiel.
"I don't think that Cumbria would necessarily be the site of new reactors, but a fair amount of the work that would come to the UK would come to west Cumbria and the design capability of Preston and Chorley would be involved."
So what does he think are the chances of a renaissance in the UK's nuclear industry? "My view would be that we have a better than 50:50 chance of the new build happening, which is more than it has been for a very long time," he says. "It's fair to say there's quite a feeling of optimism - people are excited about the possibility of new build."
Workers in the nuclear industry may be feeling smiley, but in the end, says Chris Shearlock head of renewable energy at Envirolink Northwest, "nuclear is not the dream ticket, but probably something we have to use at the moment".
But that doesn't mean, he notes, that we shouldn't be frank about the future implications. "We don't want to give these companies a blank chequebook and kill off investment in renewables," he says.
Potential failure to promote research into renewables also worries FoE's Colman. "The real danger of the nuclear industry is not in the acknowledged dangers, it's that it's a distraction and will mean we are too late to deal with climate change," he says. "The upside of nuclear is that it would be fantastic if it performed as it promised, but that has never been the case. The downside is so great, we have to ask if can we afford to take that risk."
Shearlock is concerned that the jockeying for position between different sides means that society is failing to have an honest discussion about the real level of risk it is prepared to take to secure the planet's future.
"It's a disingenuous debate we're having, pitching renewables against nuclear. We probably need both of these, at least in the short term. I am not diametrically opposed to nuclear power but I think we need to be a bit franker with ourselves about the costs that it entails." he says.
Our future risks, he says, lie in failing to ensure our future power supply as well as in galloping climate change.
"I don't think we want 60 to 70 per cent of our energy coming from imported gas," he says. "It's bad for security of supply and it doesn't take a genius to realise that we're at the end of the pipeline. There will eventually be real competition for that gas. If we had half of our electricity sourced from nuclear by 2050, then it's probably desirable in terms of gas imports and climate change.
"But over the course of this century, I'd hope that we'd have got beyond that phase and that by 2030 we'd be much more able to use wave, tidal and PV (photovoltaics) and that we wouldn't need a further phase of nuclear build. At the moment we're just plugging the gap."
Whatever the long-term future holds, if government decides to plug that gap with new reactors, it looks as though the nuclear industry in the North West can look forward to a busy few decades ahead. And if the decision goes the other way, then even if our weather means the North West is unlikely ever to make hay while the sun shines, the region's hills and coastline mean that it could perfectly easily make watts while the wind blows.
Also in: January 2006
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