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September 28, 2021 - 7:00am
The Left-wing French newspaper Libération marked Merkel’s political passing this week with a cartoon, picturing adults and children in gas masks choked by black clouds of smoke from coal-fired power plants, which accurately critiques her greatest single legacy. In one of her characteristic knee-jerk reactions to media moral panics, Merkel’s shuttering of Germany’s nuclear power plants saw the continent’s industrial giant become ever-more dependent on coal and imported Russian gas, with disastrous consequences for both the environment and EU foreign policy. George Monbiot was accurate enough, back in 2017, in describing her as “the world’s leading eco-vandal,” but the Green tendency he represents is just as bad for leading resistance to the only viable short-term solution: a massive increase in nuclear power generation.
Our own government’s push to open 16 new nuclear power stations by 2050 should be welcomed by green campaigners. As the analyst Anatol Lieven emphasises in his recent book Climate Change and the Nation State, nuclear power is the only viable means of reducing carbon emissions within the narrow timeframe before climate change leads to social and political collapse across the most densely populated portions of the earth — with unimaginable consequences for global civilisation.
No wonder UN energy experts have advised the EU to increase nuclear power generation as quickly as possible — and no wonder too that European governments are answering their call. As France’s finance minister Bruno le Maire urged recently: “Either we are fighting climate change with an ideological approach and we fail, or we are fighting climate change with a scientific approach and will be successful.”
Welcome too, and long-overdue, is the government’s push to remove China’s state-owned General Nuclear Power Group or CGN from its 20% stake in the new Sizewell C plant: as long as the Chinese state retained even the slightest role in a matter as strategically sensitive as nuclear power generation in southern England, any talk of “confronting China” in the distant Pacific was absurd.
In this context, as we head into a possible winter of discontent over worldwide power shortages, the anti-nuclear protests of the Scottish separatists and their Green allies should be simply swept away by Westminster’s firm yet benevolent hand. Clean, reliable power generation is a matter of national security as well as economic growth; like foreign policy, it is a decision for central government to make in defence of the interests of the entire nation, and not a matter for a devolved regional administration with a very lacklustre record of competence.
Indeed, that a British government can commit itself to a project so sweeping and transformative after decades of underinvestment in key national industries is a development that should be welcomed across the political spectrum. A Conservative government belatedly returning to the high modernist optimism and vigour of the postwar period is a welcome prospect: Anglomodernism is back, and this time it’s propelling us into a clean, growth-fuelled nuclear future.
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SubscribeAt last it comes together; a sound basis for a safe, reliable minimum-carbon energy mix for the UK’s future. After years of dither the government is committed to problem-solving investment in new nuclear power generation. Firstly, it has taken Merkel’s standing down, to expose the folly of Germany’s abandonment of nuclear power which resulted in more coal burning and reliance upon Russian gas. Secondly, a strategic and ethical shift in policy has ended the danger of any involvement by communist China in our energy supply. A short term shortage in petrol and diesel has raised the public perception of energy supply vulnerability. And, I am sure, the M25 blockaders have highlighted the utter irrationality of the climate change zealots, many of whom still hate and fear nuclear energy. Aris Rousinos has summarised some key arguments well, but a critical point should be made, that the UK has a domestic capability in the form of our Rolls Royce reactor technology. Better late than never we should develop a standard mini-reactor, for modular power production. There is a possible world-wide market for a low cost, flexible means of nuclear energy supply at variable scale and location. We do need sufficient political energy in the first instance however.
GRAHAM PYCOCK
“standard mini-reactor,” – great news if possible. The modest casket sized devices stored in the ground, replaced every 20 years promise to bring energy to neighborhoods. The devices can nearly stand alone or be interconnected giving us the future. If combined with flow batteries and solar, the devices can be even smaller. A power franchise for every council or community.
Nuclear is the only solution for the next 30 years. Particularly smaller plants with overlapping capacity leaving us strategically less vulnerable to shortages from down times and terrorist attack
I was thinking of terrorism when I read your comment … if we developed many smaller nuclear plants, how would we secure them all from terrorist attacks? I suppose big plants are the same – what would happen if a terrorist flew a ‘plane into a nuclear power plant?
And there’s the waste – which would also have to be secured from terrorists dispersing it in places we wouldn’t want it to be dispersed.
TheGreen movement in America is totally against nuclear..Disposal issues such a long transport times leaving open the issue of accidents. No national depository site that is politically acceptable. Terrorism, and NIMBY…are other impediments. The process and cost and approvals process in America is anything but quick. In fact it is glacial as the Green movement sues every and all initiatives they do not like. The weight of environments litigation generally grinds things to a halt. Perhaps needed items. Luddites in the Green movement would be perfectly fine to out law cars and make bicycles the only mode of transport. We might be allow candles. Nothing short of deindustrialization will satisfy some. Sigh, America is a very hard place to find common sense and compromise these days.
Perhaps the moral of the story is that it’s time for the USA to destroy the Tyranny of the Lawyers, so that its elected politicians can rule instead.
Modular small reactors promise a way around those impossible to construct huge plants.
I have always been a fan of nuclear power and I can’t see any logical arguments against it. There are many emotive arguments which start, ‘What happens if….. ‘ but arguments like that exist for everything.
Perhaps the biggest argument against it is the NIMBY thing. People might support nuclear power as long as it was situated in Lancashire and Yorkshire, well away from the Home Counties.
We will never go to nuclear power because in our democracy each of the 64 million people has to say something and be heard carefully. By the time all the answers have been collated and considered everyone will have forgotten the question. I would suggest 42 as a good answer.
There was a nuclear reactor in London for many years and may still be there but inactivated. In the early 70s the Navy was trying to get me into the nuke (bombers) program. The engineer of the diesel boat I was then serving in told me that when he did his nuclear course at Greenwich Naval College they had a small reactor in the basement on which all of his his course had to watchkeep. I don’t think Ken Livingstone was ever informed of its presence.
These may have been more common across the world than you think. I know there was a small reactor like this in Madrid during the Franco years when they were making tenative efforts towards a nuclear program that never got that far before his death.
The biggest argument against it is the storage of nuclear energy. But there are practical solutions to the problem and the high-end figures pushed by anti-nuclear activists about thousands of years of radioactivity seem to ignore the fact that radioactivity is an exponentially decaying phenomenon, so that it is only actual dangerous for a far, far smaller proption of its existence.
I used to live in a small French town which had a nuclear power plant in its commune. It was extremely popular, because it paid huge local taxes, which not only reduced the rates on private houses to a laughable level compared to the commune next door, but the surplus paid for a state of the art swimming pool, mediatek, gymnasium ( and of course , mairie). The church was virtually rebuilt , the roads were replaced, the flower beds in the public square were wondrous.
and of course the presence of a large number of well paid employees bunked up the house prices, too.
not many nimbys there.
I thought I kept up pretty well with current affairs, but it was a surprise to hear from this article that the government have announced a push to open lots of nuclear power plants by 2050. It would be wonderful if there was such a push, and even more so if it was accompanied by a PR campaign to start to overcome the opposition and its delaying tactics. Nuclear is indeed our only hope of reducing CO2 emissions significantly without economic and social collapse.
“Lots of nuclear power plants” sounds great if that is what is really on offer (meaning, I hope, the smaller Rolls-Royce reactors). Huge power plants like Sizewell C, however, may seem like the answer until you know what building one of these entails. For all the NIMBY’s objecting to the destruction of their and the local, natural environment for the next 15 years, it seems more like Armageddon, with a legacy of untreatable nuclear waste on an unstable coast for many generations to come. I do wish the advocates of nuclear power had more specific knowledge on the subject.
Good article, I agree that nuclear is the only way but Oh My God! I had missed the AngloModernist article you linked to. I love it! I bought all the ladybird books for my daughter and read them to her from an early age to try to inoculate her against the post-modern rubbish that she would soon be exposed to and to give her an optimistic vision of Britain – its past and its future.
Boris should be digging out the collection – as you say, it is the blueprint for Britain.
Mon Dieu! France, it seems, is truly a master of nuclear power, and the air in France is exceedingly clean. So why did they try to foist old school diesel submarines on those Down Under?
Nuclear power works. Problems, such as storage/disposal of nuclear waste can be solved, and more coal/fossil fuel is not the answer for many of the reasons posted here. But the left (at the time) concluded that nuclear was bad, end of story. Many navies–perhaps the US leads the way in this–really know how to do nuclear power. There is an untapped reservoir of expertise willing and able to safely run nuclear power plants. Let’s do it!
“So why did they try to foist old school diesel submarines on those Down Under?” The Aussies didn’t want to offend their neighbors NZ who refuse docking to nuclear ships.
Nuclear is clearly necessary, although if we keep increasing its presence across the world using current technologies we will be up against the relatively limited supply of uranium. What we need are thorium based breeder reactors.
Interesting in the 70s there was a lot of research in the UK into molten salt reactors which could have developed many of the technologies realistic thorium breeder reactors will need. But then the anti-nulcear crowd came in and banned it all.
Mass production of nuclear submarines. Park them under the offshore windfarms and connect them up. Environmentalists will believe wind power works, and neo-cons will believe national defence is being properly funded.
Excellent pithy article, but I would like to add that as someone who lives on the Suffolk coast, near to Sizewell, the UK has to go for a faster, more flexible approach than those currently on offer, such as the mini reactors proposed by Rolls Royce.
The French nuclear technology being proposed for Sizewell C has suffered huge problems at sites in Normandy and Finland and the costs are ballooning. Add to this a coast line that is continually eroding each year and you have to wonder whether this is not a massive white elephant in the making.
Yes to nuclear, but only if it is a sound, safe approach that is used.
I agree. Small is Beautiful.
“Our own government’s push to open 16 new nuclear power stations by 2050 should be welcomed by green campaigners.”
The year 2050 will be a great time to be alive, assuming that the next 6 parliaments can be trusted to stick to policy formulated today, but what do we do for the next 30 years? I often forget (and I doubt that I am alone in this) how utterly dependent we are on a reliably constant supply of affordable electric power – Every aspect of our lives, and not just our indulgencies, requires electric current somewhere in the chain, from your Amazon deliveries, to the money that you imagine is in your bank account, to the clean water that flows from your tap . Climate change may indeed be as important as some claim, but right now it is the least of our worries,
You make good points but in my view climate change isn’t the least of our worries, it’s just one of our many worries all of which need attention.
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Perhaps we Aussies could placate France by purchasing a reactor or trois funded by coal sales to the PRC. It’s already dark and soon to be very cold there.