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by Vicky Dales-Hutton Nuclear Power is firmly back on the agenda after Prime Minister Tony Blair recently indicated his intention to give the go-ahead to a new generation of nuclear power stations.
The Prime Minister had made his remarks in a speech to the Confederation of British Industry - and several months ahead of the publication of the Government’s review of Britain’s energy needs. The government’s thumbs-up to the nuclear option is in response to climate change and worries over energy security. "By 2025 if current policy is unchanged there will be a dramatic gap on our targets to reduce CO2 emissions, we will become heavily dependent on gas and at the same time move from being 80-90 per cent self-reliant in gas to 80-90 per cent dependent on foreign imports, mostly from the Middle East and Africa and Russia,” said Mr Blair. Mr Blair’s remarks provoked a furious reaction from environmental groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth (FOE), who accused the government of going ahead with the nuclear option without waiting for the outcome of the energy review. FOE’s Tony Juniper summed up a wide body of opinion when he said: "The UK could be leading the world in the development of a low-carbon, nuclear-free economy. But, rather than backing safe solutions for tackling climate change and meeting our energy needs, he seems intent on trying to waste yet more taxpayers' money on a discredited and dangerous nuclear dinosaur.'' Even the government's own advisers, the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC), have warned that new nuclear plants won’t tackle climate change or make Britain's energy supply any more secure.
Nuclear power has never scored highly in the image stakes. It’s seen as dangerous and expensive. Incidents such as Windscale (now Sellafield) in 1957 and Three Mile Island (1979) involving the escape of radioactive material into the atmosphere are carved in the national psyche. And, twenty years later, the effects of the Chernobyl nightmare are still being felt all around the world – 3.5 million people suffered radiation sickness and a further 5 million were exposed to dangerously high levels of radiation. Whatever your feelings about it, the figures show that nuclear power is an established source of energy. It generates about 24% of the world’s and 30% of the European Union’s electricity. Here in the UK, our 33 operating reactors provide 26% of our electricity needs. While the United States appear to prefer cheaper, gas fired power stations, countries such as Japan, China, South Korea, India and Pakistan are busy pursuing their own nuclear power station building programmes.
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