Nuclear comes clean

The Cheltenham Science Festival is now in full swing, and on Wednesday I went along to listen to Jeremy Leggett of Solar Century.Great talk.However, we didn’t get the full value of Jeremy’s insights, as the festival organisers had stuck him on a panel with four other people, one each for nuclear, coal, wind and Energy from Waste industries.The last two did well (yes, there really is a good sustainability case for the kind of Energy from Waste technologies), but our friends from the coal and nuclear industries were just dreadful.They’d clearly been sent on media training courses, which produced a weird amalgam of the patronising, the banal and the downright dishonest.But at least we know where we are these days.Not so long ago, the nuclear industry would disdainfully acknowledge that there was a role for renewables alongside nuclear.Not a big role, but at least something to add to the overall supply picture.In the last few months, however, they’ve decided to move into full battle mode, on a 'them or us' basis. As Jeremy puts it:“Those reluctant to abandon the nuclear and fossil-fuel status-quo have been reacting to all this with a fresh candour. In March, both EDF and EON advised the UK Government to cut back on renewables in favour of nuclear. The energy giants declared efforts to get 35% renewables into the UK’s electricity mix – as the Government intends – to be not only unrealistic, but damaging to nuclear plans. They said additional carbon-generating plants would be needed because of the intermittency of renewables.”I’m sorry, but this is truly pathetic.Little more a year ago, these nuclear zealots were telling the world (including any prospective investors who would listen) that any new nuclear in the UK would require zero public subsidies.Hardened anti-nuclear campaigners such as myself and Jeremy fell about laughing – not one kilowatt-hour of nuclear-generated electricity has ever gone onto the grid, anywhere in the world, over forty years, without some kind of public subsidy. So why does anybody suppose that it’s going to be any different this time round?At least the big energy companies have now had the decency to come out and tell us at least part of the truth about their nuclear ambitions.