Supporters of Nuclear Energy is a group of individuals who believe that nuclear power is vital to the interests of Britain. At present, we have no energy policy. Instead, we have an environmental policy in which energy policy is subsumed. Current policy envisages meeting growing national electricity requirements through renewables (ie predominantly wind), energy conservation and imported natural gas. Renewables and energy conservation are predictably failing to deliver and increased reliance on natural gas, imported at prices unknown from unstable parts of the world such as Russia, the Middle East, Algeria and Nigeria, is irresponsible. Already natural gas generates 40% of our electricity.

Nuclear is required for reasons of security of supply, national competitiveness and cleanliness - it emits next to no greenhouse gases. After 50 years experience of it in the UK, during which it has generated up to a third of our electricity, it has proved to be reliable and safe. There has not been a single death from a radiation accident over that half century. Moreover, the industry can manage its waste - as it has been doing for 50 years - but could handle it better if the Government summoned up the courage to designate a site for the disposal of the higher and longer radioactive wastes.

Bernard Ingham, Secretary, Supporters of Nuclear Energy.

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I am Professor of Physics at Imperial College London. I began my career as an experimental particle physicist at CERN and Berkeley but then changed to researching solar cells when I realised the importance of developing renewable electricity sources and the extent to which they are under-researched. I was a founder member of Scientists for Global Responsibility and its predecessor Scientists Against Nuclear Arms (SANA). As a member of SANA, I led a team that studied the destination of the plutonium produced by the UK civil nuclear programme. The experience gained from this study helped confirm my decision to switch to researching photovoltaic electricity. The plotonium study and the solar cell research have given me insights on the future of the UK electricity supply that I would like to share during the debate.

Keith Barnham, Scientists for Global Responsibility

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Climate change is an urgent issue that demands clear and decisive action. It is one of the most complex, multi-layered and inter-disciplinary intellectual puzzles that face the inhabitants of our planet today. It mingles geology, oceanography, biology, atmospheric chemistry, technology, design and innovation, economics, geography, politics, sociology, philosophy and ethics – and manifests itself as the interaction between four key concepts: globalisation, uncertainty, governance and sustainability.

Understanding how and why the issue of climate change has emerged so rapidly onto the international political agenda, and what implications this may have for sustainable development for the rest of this century, requires clear and logical thinking through the issues from start to finish. At the heart of the matter are the contributions that gases, emitted to the atmosphere as a result of human activity, principally carbon dioxide and methane that cause the "greenhouse effect", have upon climate change. Consider these facts:
1. In December 1997, international agreement was reached at Kyoto to cut greenhouse gas emissions. This was 40 years after scientists in Hawaii began taking readings of atmospheric CO2. Their work showed that the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere was steadily increasing.
2. The 20th century was the warmest century globally in the last 10,000 years.
3. The 1990s was the warmest decade on record with 1998 being the warmest year.
4. The 10 warmest years in global meteorological history occurred in the last 15 years.
5. The Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that the planet will warm-up by 1.4 – 5.8 degs over the next 100 years. Such a rise is without precedent over the last 10,000 years.

It may come as a surprise to the audience today, and a blow to my colleagues on the Regional Renewables Group that I chair, that I am a staunch and passionate supporter of nuclear power; I love nuclear energy. Much of my working life has been geared towards promoting the use of the energy that nuclear reactions create. Despite the inherent concerns with financial risk and safety, I see no other way in which to solve the worlds growing energy demands. So fervent am I as a supporter of this vast source of energy that I would happily relocate with anyone living near such energy resources. The views from Bamburgh Castle over the Northumberland countryside and the North Sea, for example, must rank as some of the most spectacular in Britain! How wonderful nuclear power is… The endless sound of waves as they lap the harbour walls and crash along the coastline … The scowl of wind as it sweeps our national parks … The never-ending force of water falling from the reservoir at Kielder … …what a fantastic use of nuclear energy!

Let me explain my hyperbole:
All sources of energy are based on the natural and interconnected flows of energy in our Universe that were borne 10 million trillion trillion trillionths of a second (10-43 seconds) after the Big Bang over 14 billion years ago. At that instant in time, four fundamental forces of nature were created that would govern the interaction of every single particle of matter in the Universe. These forces, weak, strong, electromagnetic and gravitational, are each of different strength and act over different scales. They govern the creation and interaction of the elementary particles known as neutrinos, the attractive force that holds protons and neutrons together to form atomic nuclei and drive chemical reactions, bind individual objects to one another, help us levitate in our seats and hold our moon in orbit around the Earth as we circle the Sun. At some point nearly 4.5 billion years ago stardust collected under a combination of these forces in the region of our solar system where nine planets, a couple of asteroids and the Sun were formed. The Sun contains more than 99.8% of the total mass of the Solar System (Jupiter contains most of the rest). The Sun’s nuclear reaction being the source of all life on Earth. At its core, the Sun’s immense gravity contracts all of its mass inwards and creates an intense pressure high enough to force atoms of hydrogen to come together in nuclear fusion reactions that create helium and energy. One million years later, via a process of convection, energy from the core of the Sun eventually reaches its surface and 8 minutes afterwards hits the surface of the Earth.

The solar energy received as radiation from the Sun’s nuclear fusion process far exceeds any amount that mankind – not for the lack of trying – could use. By heating the planet, the Sun generates wind. Wind creates waves. The Sun also powers the evapo-transpiration cycle, which allows water to generate power in hydro schemes – currently the largest source of renewable electricity in use today. Photosynthesis in plants, which is essentially a chemical storage of solar energy, creates a wide range of so-called biomass products ranging from wood fuel to rapeseed, which can be used for heat, electricity and liquid fuels. Interactions with the moon produces tidal flows, which can be intercepted and used also to produce electricity. In this grand transformation of energy from one form to another - where energy is neither created nor destroyed - it will be the choice of mankind to carefully select the most convenient and sensible point at which to capture the process of transformation from one form to another. It is the location of this ‘sensible point’ that we are debating today.

So, what is that sensible point and where does nuclear fission fit in? Let us suppose that there is no alternative to nuclear power stations and time is short, that there was no opposition to the building of nuclear power plant. If issues of waste, pollution, their proximity to homes and safety posed no concern we would, no doubt, build nuclear power stations across the land and there would be no need for this debate here today. Obviously, this is not the case. We must face these issues and respond to them. We must look at the chain of energy transformations that all stem from the nuclear fusion process in the Sun and end in the crashing waves and gale-force winds and decide where the most sensible, convenient, point at which to tap into this vast energy source lies. ‘Sensible’ for society means having specific and acceptable attributes such as capacity, cost, safety, reliability and effect upon the environment. I believe that this point is physically located as far away from the incipient nuclear reaction as possible.

The nuclear power plants that exist at Torness and Hartlepool, and those of the future that we are debating here today, locate their electro-mechanical equipment – the bits that convert the steam raised by heat from the energy expounded from the nuclear fission process - at a point extremely close to the nuclear reaction. Conventional coal and gas-fired plants operate on exactly the same principle. Their turbines and generators are of near-exact design, type and size – manufactured by the same companies - and physically located as close to the source of heat emitted as a by-product of this energy conversion process. In the process of nuclear fission, heavy atoms such as Uranium split under extreme impact with a neutron – whilst fusion, we have seen, binds atoms together releasing enormous amounts of energy compared to fission. To appreciate the magnitude of the energy released in fusion and fission reactions, consider that the burning of 1 kg of Deuterium and Tritium in fusion reactions releases the same energy as burning ~10 million kg of coal, and the fission of 1 kg of Uranium releases the equivalent of burning 12,000 barrels of oil. It is this fusing of atoms in the Sun that kick-starts the process that we see, hear and feel on Earth as meteorological, oceanographic and atmospheric energy. I would contend that this is far further down the chain in this never-ending series of energy transformations, far from the point of nuclear binding, that the society should sensibly concentrate on harnessing the energy released. Let us not judge the relative merits of these nuclear processes on energy yield alone, but mankind’s empirical measures: capacity, cost, safety, reliability and effect upon the environment.

So, what are these resources?
Some of us will remember when the nuclear lobby was once inclined to deride renewable energy. It prefers now to patronise it. It might produce 20% of our electricity by 2020, they admit, but only with large subsidies, and that's as much as renewables are going to contribute. Nuclear plus wind power - that's the nuclear industry's preferred vision today.

Myths about renewable energy need to be dispelled. One is that it is too dispersed to be of practical use without despoiling the landscape. Over vast areas of the developing world, the incident solar energy is 2000-2700 kWh per square metre of ground occupied per year. Solar-thermal power stations can convert more than 20% of this to electricity and photovoltaics now on the market about 15% of it. This is more than two orders of magnitude higher than the energy produced by common crops and wood from an equivalent area of land. All of the world's future energy demands could, in theory, be met by solar devices occupying about:

* 1% of the land now used for crops and pasture; or
* the same area of land currently inundated by hydro-electric schemes, the electricity yield per unit area of solar technologies being 50-100 times that of an average hydro scheme.

In addition to this, Britain has an abundance of other renewable energy sources that could be tapped into on a large scale. That grand old man, George Bernard Shaw, in his pamphlet published in 1908 entitled “ The Commonsense of Municipal Trading” wrote: “If we could harness to our industries the stupendous daily rush of millions of tons of tidal water through the Pentland Firth, not only need no Englishman ever go underground again for fuel, but the advantage would not be shared directly by other nations who have no such tides at their disposal”.

It is hard to overstate the size of the task of replacing fossil fuels by renewable or nuclear energy to mitigate the effects of climate change. According to the IPCC and the World Energy Assessment - which was carried out last year by the UN Development Programme and the World Energy Council - global primary-energy demands will rise from about 400 000 PJ today perhaps 4-fold to 1.6 million PJ by the end of the 21st century, depending on assumptions about energy efficiency. This is equivalent to the output of between 15 and 30 million MW of nuclear power.

There is almost always one or another renewable resource that a given country can exploit: tides for islands, the sun for equatorial countries, hot rocks for volcanic regions and so on. Any given country can, in principle, become self-sufficient in renewable energy. The global distribution of Uranium is hugely uneven (much more so than fossil fuels) and the use of nuclear power, therefore, gives countries with Uranium deposits disproportionate economic power. It is far from inconceivable that Uranium could be subject to the same kind of monopoly that the OPEC (Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries) places on oil. This prevents countries from achieving self-sufficiency in energy production. What about the economics of all this then?

The pro-nuclear faction likes to say that the recently announced construction of a nuclear power plant in Finland is being built with private money as a commercial venture. This is an exaggeration. There is no commercial interest anywhere in the world outside of the state-run electricity sectors. Many of the private investors of this station are, in fact, municipal energy companies that have a near-monopoly on heating homes in their districts, a situation that has no parallel in this country. Helsinki Energy, for instance, is owned by Helsinki City Council. It invested in the new nuclear station because the Council told it to.

The financial support for nuclear power over the past five decades has been colossal - about a hundred times the amount we have spent on developing renewable energy and further immense subsidies will be required to deal with the legacy of nuclear wastes and the decommissioning of power stations. Indeed, following the privatisation of the electricity industry in the late 1980s, the UK introduced a Non-Fossil Fuel Obligation to support nuclear power; it injected £8bn of subsidies into the industry after it had been sold off, while another £5bn is reportedly needed to deal with the decommissioning of the Dounreay nuclear facility. The NFFO, in contrast, injected just £750m (less than 10% of the available funds) into renewable energy.

Learning effects – the progressive reduction in costs arising from gaining experience in repeated, continuous, production are relatively limited in the case of nuclear power. While learning effects are typically in the order of 5-25 per cent for each doubling of cumulative production for the energy sector as a whole, the figure for nuclear power is only about 6 per cent.190 In the case of renewable energy sources, if costs fall by 18–20 per cent for every doubling of cumulative production, it will take an increase in cumulative production of around 10 for costs to be halved. In the case of nuclear energy, with a learning effect of 6 per cent, costs would be halved only when cumulative production had been increased by a factor of more than 3,000. To underline this crucial point, it means that nuclear power is 300 times less efficient at lowering its costs compared to renewables.

A further issue arising in comparing nuclear power with renewable technologies, and particularly micro-renewables, is the relative maturity of these sectors. Since nuclear power has been operating on a substantial scale for half a century, new production increases cumulative production by a relatively small amount. Thus the 5.8 per cent learning effect is applied to a relatively small number, limiting cost reduction still further. Most renewable technologies (except hydro) have thus-far been much smaller in scale – and micro-renewables still more so. The result is a much greater benefit in terms of reducing the cost of future non-carbon energy production.

Thus there are two distinct factors, each of which makes this consideration much more positive for micro-renewables than for nuclear: first, the nuclear learning curve is shallower than that for micro-renewables; and, secondly, nuclear is further along the curve, which becomes progressively shallower as production increases.

So how should we deal with greenhouse gases?
Even with a major nuclear building programme, would it make much difference in terms of global greenhouse gas emissions? The IAEA’s most recent review of the sector looked at two different scenarios. In the first, in which no new nuclear stations beyond those already planned get built, I quote: “Nuclear power’s share of global electricity generation decreases after 2010 to 12% in 2030, compared to 16% in 2002” meaning that its relative contribution to fighting global warming falls also. However, ironically, nuclear power’s potential relative contribution to reducing greenhouse emissions is even worse under the IAEA’s more optimistic high-growth scenario.

This is because the model takes account of the fact that, in order to pay for a major nuclear building programme, there would have to be high economic growth, which would still be largely powered by even faster growth of fossil-fuel use. Hence the conclusion that under the high nuclear growth scenario, quote: “generation steadily increases by a total of 46% through 2020 and by 70% through 2030” but, quote: “overall electricity generation increases even faster than nuclear power, causing nuclear power’s share of overall electricity to decline. By 2030 the nuclear share is down to 11%”.

Even a report produced in 2004 by the IAEA to mark the 50th anniversary of nuclear power conceded that it could not stop climate change. Furthermore, the nuclear industry is highly capital intensive and one of the least labour-intensive methods of energy generation. Due to technological changes, any new cycle of nuclear power stations would employ fewer people than existing plants. Renewable energy, on the other hand, has rich potential for job creation. The European Commission estimated that the predicted growth in the renewable energy sector would create nearly one million new jobs by 2020, with at least 15,000 being created in the UK.

In conclusion therefore:
The Government is committed to ‘evidence-based policy’. This alone should rule out a nuclear comeback. The limited criteria of cost and security are enough to direct the UK down the path of renewable energy. By adding further, meaningful, criteria to an assessment of energy choices, such a decision is merely confirmed.

The major problem is the big numbers. The world uses some 320 billion kWh of energy a day. That’s equal to about 22 light bulbs burning non-stop for every person on the planet – the latest estimates show that within the next century humanity could use three times as much.

The total amount of incoming solar energy absorbed by the Earth and its atmosphere in one year is around 4 million million million PJ, equivalent to 15-20 times the amount of energy stored in all of the world’s reserves of recoverable hydrocarbons. Indeed, if just 0.005%, that is, one-20 thousandth, of this solar energy could be captured, using fuel crops, specially designed buildings, wind and water turbines, solar collectors, wave energy convertors and the like, it would supply more useful energy over the year than is currently obtained by burning fossil fuels.

We’re going to need everything that we can get from biomass, everything we can get from solar, everything we can get from wind. With existing and proven technologies, renewable energy offers safe, reliable, clean, local and increasingly cost-effective, alternatives for all our energy needs. Combined with the rational use of energy, renewable energy can provide everything fossil fuels currently offer for: * Heating and cooling * Electricity * Transport fuels and * Chemicals where biofuels can provide a wide range of products currently based on oil and gas.
I rest my case.

Ian Burdon, North East Renewable Energy Group

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