Tony Loves Nukes

The biggest surprise of the week.  Ahead of the results of the government’s review of energy policy, Tony Blair announced to the CBI last night that the nuclear option, involving the construction of somewhere between 6 and 10 new reactors, is the only way to go if we are to avoid ‘a serious dereliction of our duty to the future of this country’.This is an interesting new tack, selling the rebranding of nuke (which I’ve written about before here) as a huggably low carbon energy source on the basis of the well-being of a future constituency of voters.  ‘Won’t someone please think of the children??!?’, indeed.  This question of responsibility gets cashed out by Blair in two ways: firstly, it’s about carbon emissions.  Nuclear energy is apparently the only way we’re going to meet our targets for cutting emissions – if ‘current policy is unchanged’, then by 2025 then there’s gonna be a big shortfall.  Secondly, our responsibility to the future consists in protecting ‘energy security’, by reducing our dependence on imports of gas.

How is this noble acceptance of our obligation to generations yet unborn to be carried forward?

Ministers believe a new generation of nuclear stations will require an extension of the current renewables subsidy to nuclear electricity and some form of pre-licensing agreement to speed up planning permission for new stations.

More public money for the nuclear industry and less accountability via the planning process?  Maybe the eco-fascism about which free-marketeers have been worrying their purdy li’l heads ever since Rachel Carson came on the scene really is just around the corner: the upshot of Blair’s position does seem to be that, for the sake of future generations, we’re all going to have to pay more taxes (tighten your belts!) and accept restrictions on our liberties (don’t even think about complaining when a new reactor + long-term waste storage facilities land on your doorstep).  Because it’s another emergency, folks!  And we still haven’t finished with the last one, the one about brown people who like blowing things up because they’re evil.  You remember? Planes crashed into a building in New York and suddenly everything went all Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom?

I digress.  Let’s look at this use of the future as a justification for suddenly plunging nuclear-wards.  As Blair understands it, this responsibility consists in precisely two things: cutting carbon emissions and energy security.  Policy has to change within the next 11-20 years.  The missing step in this argument, though, is why, on this definition of our obligations to the future, this change has to be in favour of nuclear.   Further, one might also ask the big question: is this understanding of responsibility and the implied risks we’re running adequate?  Is this a way of successfully dealing with what political philosophers like to call a problem of intergenerational justice?

If energy security is the issue, then consider the following points.  Any form of energy that needs to be imported is suspect.  Cue glib aside about the UK’s vast North Sea uranium reserves – oh, and if responsibility is on the agenda, one might also mention the pollution visited by uranium mining on communities in those far off lands of which we know nothing where it takes place.  Secondly, the reason gas is such an important part of the UK’s energy portfolio is that it’s used for heating.  Greater provision of nuclear power isn’t going to help there – unless there’s a massive move towards electric heating, as happened in France, miraculously about the same time that the French nuclear industry was growing and looking to maximise its advantage.  Coincidentally, electric heating is one of the best ways of wasting energy there is, so presumably a similar move isn’t on the agenda for Blair, what with all his deep concern about energy efficiency and so on.  

As far as carbon emissions goes, then there remains the (except for Blair and David King) entirely unresolved question of just how far nuclear can help, and whether the vast subsidies that will need to be pumped into construction, maintenance and decommissioning might not be better spent on research into improving solar cell efficiency and developing hydrogen fuel.  Whether ‘policy must change’ necessarily equals ‘let’s throw stupid amounts of money at nuclear’ remains unproven.

But if we think a little more about the fundamental problem of the nature of our responsibility to future generations, then it seems Blair is really missing the point, or perhaps ignoring it even though it’s staring him in the face.  As a new justificatory tack to take, this is very interesting.  I don’t remember, say, PFI being sold to us on the basis of our responsibility to the future.  Perhaps because this was an example of the familiar accountant’s practice of future-discounting, whereby the costs and benefits of a policy are assumed to decrease the longer it takes for them to be taken up.  On this assumption, it makes sense to put off costs as long as possible, and seize benefits as soon as possible – crudely, to ensure that whatever you do, you live to reap the benefits and die before you have to pay the costs.  With PFI (if you’re really, I mean, incredibly lucky) you get a hospital in six months, but the cost is spread out over 30 years – and those alive thirty years’ hence find they’re still paying for something which is now in fine falling-down condition.  But then with nuclear energy, we get increased energy generating capacity now, with the huge cost of decommissioning being taken up say 50-70 years in the future.  Will the owners of the plants be able to pay?  Are the current estimated costs accurate?  Or will they go up and up, as the costs of decommissioning nuclear plants tend to?  A lot of uncertainty there, on the basis of which it would arguably be pretty irresponsible to act: but hey, there is the certainty that we’d get more generating capacity if we built more nuclear power plants.  So that’s all right then.

And then the elephant in the room, the waste issue: deep burial is the only game in town, but remains an untested solution.  How after all do you thoroughly test a waste management solution that has to withstand geological events over the course of a few thousand years?  Uncertainty again, so much of it as to arguably make Blair’s claim to be taking responsibility now look like arrant irresponsibility.  As with the issue of the long-term costs of nuclear energy, the waste solution is really for the benefit of the present: deep burial enables to think that we’ve done our duty, once and for all – the problem put out of sight, out of mind. 

Perhaps the bottom line here is that the solution that Blair seems to have already accepted is one that his audience last night would also have found highly acceptable.

If we have to tighten our belts, restrict our lifestyles, and accept more limitations on our liberties because of this new emergency we face, it’s not ultimately for the sake of future generations: it’s for the short- and medium-term benefit of some members of the current generation and their immediate descendants.  Last night Blair used his privileged position to define the risks that hang over us and our descendents, and our responsibilities in the face of them.  The question of what these really are is too important to leave to Tony’s speechwriter, however.