Tony Curzon Price (London, openDemocracy): I entirely support Stuart Weir's view that a decision as momentous as restarting nuclear build should be arrived at by something like a Royal Commission. The question is too large, delicate and long term for ordinary representative institutions to deliver legitimacy.
On the substance, here are the reasons why I think the nuclear option should be kept open - where "option kept open" is not some euphemism for neither yes nor no; it means maintaining the institutions, projects, engineers, university courses that make nuclear a real option. It may even mean doing what the government is doing now, which is not certain to deliver a nuclear power station, but is likely to produce an interested group of experts and firms.
Nuclear has risks, and its long term costs are possibly unquantifiable. But so are those of fossil fuels - not only in climate change terms, but also in geopolitical consequences. Did Chirac's opposition to Bush's war have something to do with France's relative energy independence? Quite likely. And how easily could a fossil-fuel induced Middle East conflagration have appalling consequences? Quite easily.
So the argument is not about the risks and costs of nuclear versus fossil. The issue is nuclear versus other renewables. My own perfect energy future is one of austere voluntary simplicity, public transport, low transport etc. That is a world that probably can be mostly fuelled by non-nuclear renewables. But what if it is not possible to persuade our fellow nation and world-dwellers to see this as a good future? Then the choice is between fossil and nuclear (if there is a choice at all ... the earth's climate may have gone irretrievably Venus-like by then if we are living this scenario).
So the nuclear option should be maintained, not because it is attractive, but because it may be the last chance if we fail to deliver an environmentalism (or ecologism?) that profoundly changes consumerist lifestyles. But to repeat - Stuart Weir is right to insist this argument should have been put by someone to an independent, semi-expert, semi-lay commission.
Comments
How do you propose this Royal Commission-alike be selected, what should the time-frame be for it to make a decision?
Noting of course that we're going to lose 30% of our electricity generating capability within 20 years if we do nothing.
(Not attacking, genuinely interested in your proposal)
A deliberative assessment, not a "Royal" Commission where the selection of the members decides the outcome, would be a great thing to have on energy policy overall, as Stuart suggests, and not just nuclear. I can see that there may be a case for an ecology of sources. But what strikes me, and I think Polly Toynbee was very good on this in today's Guardian (and she has been saying it for 10 years on energy!) is that the imaginative time and effort needs to go into decentralising all the ways in which the issue can be addressed rather than centralising it into one Cabinet decision that is foregone and not deliberative at all, as Polly well describes. For example:
1. Large government prizes for best ways of lowering cost of renewables and capital risk sharing.
2. Emphasis on how renewables, eg photovoltaic can be manufactured. If the conversion efficiency of cells is very low, how about very cheap manufacture, as I think has been developed in California.
3. Serious investment in saving energy, insulation, shared heating, tower block efficiency.
I'd have much more confidence in the integrity of assessing the nuclear option from a government clearly doing everything else that it could. There is a huge bias here in favour of the vast capital projects, eg wind power at sea, take a look at the great comment by the diving superintendent, Christian, in his comment on Stuart's post.
Anthony
Anthony, of course you're right that a nuclear option cannot be credible if it is pursued as the _only_ option.
I think the scale of the energy/environment problem has to be kept always in mind. We need, even if we transform our own lifestyles, a world which increases average energy consumption per head while reducing total energy-related emissions. (Much) more energy, fewer emissions if you want to marry the benefits of mechanisation and the environmental priority.
Why make non-nuclear renewables our only card in this game?
There is no legitimacy in the idea of a Royal Commission, particularly when the issue has now been twice mishandled by the Government.
When Greenpeace challenged the 2006 consultation on nuclear power, the High Court ruled that it was 'inadequate, misleading, very seriously flawed and procedurally unfair'.
Given that the very same objections can be made (and indeed have been made) about the 2007 exercise, then once the inevitable legal challenge to this consultation proves successful later this year, the only democratic response would be a full public enquiry.
Either that or it's petition the Attorney General to start proceedings to find the Government in criminal contempt of court...
I find it interesting that some questions are "too large, delicate and long term for ordinary representative institutions to deliver legitimacy".
Wouldn't "something like a Royal Commission", as outlined by Stuart Weir, be less 'democratic' than our ordinary representative institutions?
ukliberty -- well, a political culture now dominated by narrow re-election calculations around 5 year parliaments can't really be expected to make very long term decisions well. look at the political failure over climate change. there must be a solution - a democratic solution - to the time-scale problem over which we make decisions.
Rochenko - the failure of consultation so far is a good reason to find what the institutional arrangements are that can deliver a legitimate decision here. some kind of fully deliberative process is needed.
Tony
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