nuclear power | ukwatch.net

Renewing our obligations

Ellie Keen — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 22:32:33 +0000

The government is committed to massive new nuclear build in Britain. We do not yet know the details of Gordon Brown’s nuclear plan, least of all how all the new nuclear power stations are to be paid for. But substantial public subsidy is definitely part of the deal, as described by David Lowry on Commentisfree and David Burke, writing in Prospect. After all, EDF would hardly have paid £12.5bn for British Energy if it did not have a clear promise of jam tomorrow.

But while the Brown nuclear plan (I am referring here to Gordon Brown, of course, not his brother Andrew, EDF Energy’s head of media relations) glides serenely ahead, where does this leave the UK’s renewable ambitions? Remember that the UK already has a policy to generate 20% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, and that this target will need to be doubled to around 40% for the UK to achieve its share of the new EU-wide target to source 20% of all energy from renewables by the same date.

So far, Brown has been far more active in trying to water down the UK’s EU renewable target than in finding ways to meet it, in spite of the enormous renewable resources of wind, wave and tide, which sweep our shores. But even if he succeeds in the latest ploy to knock 11% off the UK’s target by not counting the energy used in aviation, the UK still has a lot of renewable generation capacity to build – approaching 50,000MW of wind for a start.

And this creates a problem: nuclear power and intermittent renewables make a very poor match. Ministers and most nuclear advocates now insist that they have nothing against renewables – on the contrary, they adore them, and all they are advocating is a sensible mix of nuclear power and renewables to give the UK a wonderful new low-carbon electricity system. But the idea does not add up.

The wind turbines (onshore and increasingly offshore) that will have to produce most of our renewable electricity can only generate when and where the wind is blowing. The problems of over- and under-supply created by this intermittency can be minimised by spreading wind turbines over a broad geographical area, and by mixing them with other intermittent renewables, such as wave and solar PV. But as the renewable fraction increases, so the need to smooth out the intermittency in the electricity supply rises, and to do this with coal-fired power stations is to defeat our purpose.

Nuclear power has a similar but opposite problem. Once a nuclear power station is up and running, the best way to run it is to keep on producing electricity at a constant rate – until it develops some fault and cuts out altogether, that is. Add the two together, nuclear and intermittent renewables, and what do you get? You might imagine the two complement each other.

But the opposite is the case. Because nuclear is “always on”, it does nothing to smooth the supply curve from wind, or to better match total supply to demand, which is also highly variable. Indeed, the renewable supply profile fits consumer demand better than the nuclear straight-line output because the wind blows more during periods of peak electricity demand – that is mornings and evenings, and winter. By adding nuclear power into the mix, electricity supply actually fits demand worse, not better.

So, the more the government backs nuclear power, the more it is undermining the future of renewables in the UK’s energy supply. By backing the nuclear horse so strongly, it is revealing its probable real long-term aim: to use the ineffective and costly Renewables Obligation to fail to meet its targets (which it is guaranteed to do) and then claim that its nuclear power should count as “renewable” because it is low-carbon. Anyway, 2020 is several elections away, and whoever is in charge at the time can deal with the problem then.

But maybe I’m wrong and the government really does want renewables to have a major role. If so, here are five important things it ought to be doing to demonstrate its good intentions:

1. The natural companion to intermittent renewables is not nuclear but hydropower, which can be turned on and off to supply electricity when it is needed, and to store energy for when it is in surplus. So, we should seriously expand hydropower capacity in the UK, which currently stands at about 1,500MW, with a view to using it not for baseload generation but to balance gaps between supply and demand. The pumped storage facility at Dinorwig in Wales is already doing this on a huge scale, if for brief periods, with its ability to kick a colossal 1,320MW into the grid at 12 seconds’ notice. We need a large number of plants designed to perform a similar role, but over periods of hours and days, rather than minutes. Small-scale hydro could also have a big role in balancing the output from individual wind farms, perhaps sharing the same grid connections. The new 100MW station at Glendoe (Scotland’s first new large hydro plant in 50 years) is to be welcomed, but there is an even bigger role for small-scale hydro, which could produce a further 650MW.

2. We should also improve our connections to other European countries, as this will help to smooth the overall renewables supply curve, and so benefit all countries. Denmark, Germany, Spain and Portugal are far enough away from the UK for their wind farms to be out of sync with ours, so by linking them all together, wind power surges in one country can compensate for dips in others. There is also growing output from photovoltaic panels (PV) in Germany, Spain and Italy, which can further smooth the renewable supply curve. Also note that Denmark uses its connection to Norway, which gets 99% of its electricity from hydro, to dump surplus wind energy, and draw on the hydro when the wind drops. We should do the same. Concentrated solar power (CSP) from Spain, Portugal and North Africa will also make a huge contribution to renewable generation and supply stability. Like hydro (and unlike solar PV), CSP can store up energy (as heat) and use it to generate electricity when needed.

3. We also need to beef up our own UK grid to link the places our renewable power will be coming from far away from existing power stations – and using undergound power lines so as not to disfigure our upland landscapes. A new west coast interconnector would be an excellent way to link the many power sources along the UK’s western seaboard, and link to Ireland at the same time. The electricity distribution system also needs to be re-engineered to accommodate small- and medium-scale embedded generation, from local combined heat and power plants to solar PV tiles on domestic roofs. We also need to use price signals on the grid to make our demand responsive to supply, so that, for example, freezers stock up on cold when electricity is cheap, and coast along when the price is high.

4. Scrap the failed Renewables Obligation and replace it with a feed-in tarriffs system, or another system of fixed-price contracts to give renewable developers much needed security for long-term investment. This system would aim to deliver electricity quality – that is a smooth output matching demand – not just quantity. To do this, it would pay a premium for diversity of supply to bring in less productive locations, and less economic technologies such as wave power and solar PV. Note that the British Pelamis wave power technology has now been deployed in Portugal thanks to the far greater commitment to renewables of the Portuguese government.

5. Finally, the government should come clean about the deals it has made with EDF and other nuclear generators. It must be seen to hold firm to its promise not to subsidise nuclear power, either overtly or covertly, made in the 2006 Energy Review: “It will be for the private sector to initiate, fund, construct and operate new nuclear plants and to cover the full cost of decommissioning and their full share of long-term waste management costs.”

Why greens must learn to love nuclear power

tim — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 22:18:37 +0000

“If nuclear power is the answer, it must have been a pretty stupid question,” went an oft-cited slogan of the 1970s environmental movement. But the question was not stupid, and it is even less so today when the challenge is even blunter: how are we going to provide for our energy needs in a way that does not destroy, via global warming, the capacity of our planet to support life? The hard truth is that if nuclear power is not at least part of the answer, then answering that challenge is going to be very difficult indeed.

Unfortunately, just by writing the sentence above, I will already have prompted many readers to switch off. Being anti-nuclear is an article of faith (and I use that word intentionally) for many people in today’s environmental movement and beyond, just as it was during the 1970s. That the Green Party, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace have held the same position on the subject for 30 years could show admirable consistency – but it could also be evidence of dogmatic closed-mindedness.

When I first broached the issue in these pages three years ago, the reaction was extraordinary. A close acquaintance sent me a tearful email saying that I had “destroyed” her motivation for environmental campaigning. Other friends here in Oxford accused me – jokingly, of course – of having formed a romantic liaison with BNFL’s spokeswoman. Just last week, after tackling the subject once again, I received a one-line email from a well-known environmentalist accusing me of having “done a considerable disservice to the cause of combating climate change”.

So why does the nuclear issue evoke such strong reactions? For answers, I think we need to look to nuclear’s past, when today’s entrenched positions were first formed. Civil nuclear power began life as a heavily state-subsidised industry largely designed to produce plutonium for bombs. Civil nuclear power was part of the military-industrial complex and shrouded in secrecy. An association with the mushroom cloud has tainted the nuclear industry ever since – and clearly continues to be an issue in countries such as Iran, North Korea and Pakistan.

Then there is radiation. Most people are terrified of radiation precisely because it is invisible, making it all the more threatening, and because of its potential to cause cancer and genetic deformities. (Many other cancer-causing agents such as food or smoke seem innocuous by comparison.) Nuclear accidents and near-meltdowns – such as Three Mile Island in 1979 – provoke scary headlines throughout the media, as did popular treatments such as the film The China Syndrome (released, by an extraordinary stroke of luck for the film-makers, just 12 days before Three Mile Island), in which a sinister nuclear cabal covers up evidence of an accident.

It is undeniable that nuclear fission generates radioactive by-products, some of which will inevitably enter the environment. It is also undeniable that exposure to radiation increases the risk of cancer (though radiation can also be employed to treat cancers). But it is the level of risk that counts, and here the story is less fearsome than many would have us believe. Take Three Mile Island, which exposed local populations to one millirem of radiation on average(1). This equates to roughly what we all receive from natural sources (cosmic rays and naturally occurring radioactive elements in the ground) every four days(2). The number of deaths from Three Mile Island – the worst civil nuclear accident ever in a western country, and one that ended the US nuclear programme (not a single reactor has been built since) – is therefore officially estimated to be zero(3).

Even Chernobyl, surely the worst-imaginable case for a nuclear disaster, was far less deadly than most people think. In the immediate aftermath of the explosion, 28 people died due to acute radiation sickness(4) – all firemen and power plant workers, some of whom had been exposed to radiation doses as high as one million millirems(5). By comparison, 167 men were killed during the Piper Alpha disaster on a North Sea oil rig in 1988. But it is the long-term effects from Chernobyl that tend to scare people most. In a 2006 report, Greenpeace claimed that “60,000 people have additionally died in Russia because of the Chernobyl accident, and estimates of the total death toll for the Ukraine and Belarus could reach another 140,000”(6).

These figures, if correct, would make Chernobyl one of the worst single man-made disasters of the last century. But are they correct? The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation reports 4,000 cases of thyroid cancer in children and young people in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, but very few deaths (thyroid cancer is mostly treatable). Indeed, it concludes, “There is no evidence of a major public health impact attributable to radiation exposure 20 years after the accident”, and no evidence of any increase in cancer or leukaemia among exposed populations(7). The World Health Organisation concludes that while a few thousand deaths may be caused over the next 70 years by Chernobyl’s radioactive release, this number “will be indiscernible from the background of overall deaths in the large population group”(8). Without wishing to downplay the tragedy for the victims – especially the 300,000 people who were evacuated permanently – the explosion has even been good for wildlife, which has thrived in the 30km exclusion zone(9).

A plentiful supply of free fuel

One way of statistically assessing the safety of nuclear power versus other technologies is to use the measure of deaths per gigawatt-year. This technique is cited by Cambridge University’s Professor David MacKay in his book Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air (available free on the web), and shows that in Europe, nuclear and wind power are the safest technologies (about 0.1 death per GWy), while oil, coal and biomass the most dangerous (above 1 per GWy)(10).

A focus on statistics is also useful when assessing the financial costs of nuclear power. The high price for nuclear waste disposal and decommissioning – with a hefty chunk always payable from public funds – is surely one of the environmental lobby’s strongest arguments, particularly if any subsidy from taxpayers means taking money away from investment in renewables. Helen Caldicott’s book Nuclear Power is Not the Answer discusses the finances of nuclear under a chapter subheaded “Socialised Electricity”, quoting figures for nuclear’s subsidy in the US over recent decades of $70bn. To make a direct cost comparison, the International Energy Agency in a 2005 study looked at life-cycle costs for all power sources – including construction costs, operations, fuel and decommissioning – and concluded that nuclear was the cheapest option, followed by coal, wind and gas(11).

But how about nuclear power’s potential contribution to mitigating global warming? One persistent myth is that once construction and uranium mining are taken into account, nuclear is no better than fossil fuels. However, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), total life-cycle greenhouse-gas emission per unit of electricity is about 40g CO2-equivalent per kilowatt-hour, “similar to those for renewable energy sources”(12).

But why not ditch nuclear and focus only on renewables, as the greens suggest? MacKay calculates that even if we covered the windiest 10 per cent of the UK with wind turbines, put solar panels on all south-facing roofs, implemented strong energy efficiency measures across the economy, built offshore wind turbines across an area of sea two-thirds the size of Wales, and fully exploited every other conceivable source of renewables (including wave and tidal power), energy production would still not match current consumption(13).

This is rather different to Britain being the “Saudi Arabia of wind power” as many in the environmental movement are fond of asserting. Indeed, MacKay concludes that we will need to import renewable electricity from other countries – primarily from solar farms in the North African desert – or choose nuclear, or both. Indeed, it is vital to stress the neither I nor MacKay nor any credible expert suggests a choice between renewables and nuclear: the sensible conclusion is that we need both, soon, and on a large scale if we are to phase out coal and other fossil fuels as rapidly as the climate needs. As MacKay told me: “We need to get building.”

The UK’s Sustainable Development Commission, in its 2006 report on nuclear power, argued that new plants should be ruled out until the existing waste problem could be solved(14). But what if a new generation of nuclear plants could be designed that, instead of producing more waste to leave as a toxic legacy for our grandchildren, actually generated energy by burning up existing waste stockpiles? This is the solution proposed by Tom Blees, a US-based writer, in his upcoming book Prescription for the Planet(15). Blees focuses particularly on so-called fourth-generation nuclear technology – better known as fast-breeder reactors. While conventional thermal reactors use less than 1 per cent of the potential energy in their uranium fuel, fast-breeders are 60 times more efficient, and can burn virtually all of the energy available in the uranium ore.

This gives these fourth-generation reactors a big advantage. As Blees puts it: “Thus we have a prodigious supply of free fuel that is actually even better than free, for it is material that we are quite desperate to get rid of.” Moreover, fast-breeder reactors can also run on the “depleted” uranium left behind by conventional reactors, and help reduce the proliferation threat by burning up plutonium stockpiles left over from decommissioned nuclear weapons. Blees estimates that supplies of nuclear waste and depleted uranium are sufficient to “provide all the power needs of the entire planet for hundreds of years before we need to mine any more uranium”. Although these reactors produce plutonium – which might be used for nuclear weapons, and could therefore pose a proliferation threat – weapons-grade material is never isolated in the fuel-cycle process, making fast-breeders less dangerous to international stability than conventional reactors, and relatively simple to inspect.

But what about the waste these reactors themselves produce? Since the by-products of fast-breeder reactors are highly radioactive, they have much shorter half-lives – rendering them inert in a couple of centuries, instead of the longer time over which conventional nuclear waste remains dangerous. (Once again there is a powerful myth here – that high-level waste from reactors remains dangerous for enormous lengths of time. Greenpeace states that “waste will remain dangerous for up to a million years”(16). In fact, almost all waste will have decayed back to a level of radio activity less than the original uranium ore in less than a thousand years.)(17) Fourth-generation nu clear technology is also inherently safer than earlier designs. The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR), discussed at length by Blees, operates at atmospheric pressure, reducing the possibility of leaks and loss-of-coolant accidents. It is also designed to be “walk-away safe”, meaning that if all operators stood up and left, the reactor would shut itself down automatically rather than overheat and suffer a meltdown.

So why, given the purported advantages in safety and fuel use, have fast-breeders not been developed commercially? The US Integral Fast Reactor programme was shut down in 1994, possibly – Blees suggests – because of political pressure levied on the Clinton administration by anti-nuclear campaigners. (Even so, fourth-generation nuclear power plants are being built in India, Russia, Japan and China.) Ironically, the Clinton administration may have inadvertently killed off one of the most promising solutions to global warming in an attempt to please environmentalists. Even if the decision were to be reversed immediately, 20 years has been lost.

It is worth remembering the contribution that nuclear power has already made to offsetting global warming: the world’s 442 operating nuclear reactors, which produce 16 per cent of global electricity, save 2.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year compared to coal, according to the IPCC. Blees agrees that “the most pressing issue is to shut down all coal-fired power plants” and urges a “Manhattan Project-like” effort to convert the world’s non-renewable power to IFRs by the thousand. This sounds daunting but it is not unprecedented: France converted its power supply to 80 per cent nuclear in the space of just 25 years by building about six reactors a year.

An anti-nuclear report published by the Oxford Research Group in 2007 concluded that an additional 2,500 reactors would need to be built by 2075 to significantly mitigate global warming(19). The report’s authors suggested that this was a “pipe-dream”. But it sounds eminently achievable to me, given that it is only a five-times increase from today. The question is this: are those who care about global warming prepared to reconsider their opposition to nuclear power in this new era? We are no longer living in the 1970s. Today, the world is more threatened even than it was during the Cold War. Only this time nuclear power – instead of being part of the problem – can be part of the solution.

References:

(1) United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Fact Sheet on the Three Mile Island Accident, http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3mile-isle.htm…
(2) Chapter 5 in ‘The Nuclear Energy Option’ by Bernard Cohen, 1990. http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/blc/book/chapter5.html
(3) United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Fact Sheet on the Three Mile Island Accident, http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3mile-isle.htm…
(4) World Health Organisation, ‘Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident and Special Health Care Programmes’, 2006. http://www.who.int/entity/ionizing_radiation/chernobyl/WHO%20Report%20on…
(5) Chapter 7 in ‘The Nuclear Energy Option’ by Bernard Cohen, 1990. http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/blc/book/chapter7.html
(6) Greenpeace, ‘Chernobyl death toll grossly underestimated’, 18 April 2006. http://www.greenpeace.org/international/news/chernobyl-deaths-180406
(7) UNSCEAR, ‘The Chernobyl Accident: UNSCEAR’s assessments of the radiation effects’, http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html#Health
(8) World Health Organisation, ‘Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident and Special Health Care Programmes’, 2006.
(9) National Geographic News, April 26, 2006: ‘Despite mutations, Chernobyl wildlife is thriving’. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/04/0426_060426_chernobyl.ht…
(10) David McKay, ‘Sustainable Energy – without the hot air’, Part 2, ‘Making a difference’, p174. http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/cft.pdf
(11) IEA, ‘Projected costs of generating electricity – 2005 update’.
(12) IPCC, 2007: ‘Mitigation’. p. 269. http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg3/ar4-wg3-chapter4.pdf
(13) David McKay, ‘Sustainable Energy – without the hot air’, Part 1, ‘Numbers, not adjectives’.
(14) SDC, ‘Is nuclear the answer?’, http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/pages/060306.html
(15)Tom Blees, 2008: ‘Prescription for the Planet – The painless remedy for our energy and environmental crises’. http://www.prescriptionfortheplanet.com
(16) Greenpeace, ‘Nuclear power – the problems’. http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/nuclear/problems
(17) World Nuclear Association, ‘Radioactive Wastes’, see figure ‘Decay in radioactivity of high-level waste’. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf60.html
(18) IPCC, 2007: ‘Mitigation’. p. 269. http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg3/ar4-wg3-chapter4.pdf
(19) Oxford Research Group, 2007: ‘Too Hot to Handle: The future of civil nuclear power’, p.7 http://www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk/publications/briefing_papers/pdf/t…

Brown goes nuclear

Alex Doherty — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 13:58:19 +0000

The problem with the Labour government is not the unpopularity of Gordon Brown, as measured by successive opinion polls, but the policies being pursued. Let me take one important example.

Last Wednesday Gordon Brown held his monthly prime-ministerial press conference. The reports by the Guardian’s current and former political editors (‘Producers may pass on cost of energy package to consumers’; “Brown comes up with a cones hotline moment” and the supporting editorial, ‘Lofty ideals’ ) overlooked the fact that in the press conference launching the energy support package, Brown chose on no less than three occasions to praise nuclear power.

He said: “I think people may have forgotten that we made the right decision about nuclear power, I think very few people now doubt that”.

Actually, the prime minister might be surprised that many do still oppose an energy source that produces dangerous plutonium as an unavoidable byproduct, and sometimes uses it in new fuel too, requiring methods of transport that are vulnerable to terrorism. Some 105,000 kilograms of this stuff is stockpiled at Sellafield: it takes but 5 kilos to make a bomb of the size that devastated Nagasaki in 1945.

As Dr Bennett Ramberg, security advisor to the state department in the 1980s, has argued, nuclear regulators are unfortunately not likely to implement appropriate protective insurance strategies “as long as they cling to the view that attacks are improbable and plants are well protected. The annual commemoration of the Chernobyl accident should serve as a useful reminder of what can happen if the presumptions prove wrong.”

Some think that Brown, hitherto sceptical about the benefits of nuclear power, may have been unduly influenced by the fact that his brother is public relations chief for EDF-UK, whose parent company in France – a company 78% dependent on nuclear power – is in the final throes of buying the majority share in Britain’s main nuclear generator, British Energy.

Brown added “I am encouraging other countries to go ahead with nuclear power, France and Britain are leaders in nuclear power … “ This is inconsistent with Brown’s insistence on fighting international terrorism and the foreign secretary’s oft-stated determination to curb nuclear proliferation. More, France has been a major industrial partner in the controversial Iranian nuclear industry. A little known report prepared last year by Paris-based analyst, Mycle Schneider, for the Green group in the European parliament, revealed that in 1974 Iran took a 40% share in a special purpose nuclear company Sofidif, the other 60% owned by the French Government owned nuclear giant, Areva. The next year, Schneider reports, Sofidif took up a 25% share in the international Eurodif consortium that built a large uranium enrichment facility in Pierrelatte in the south of France. Sofidif still exists, still holds the same share in Eurodif and is still active. In a letter dated 13 February 2006 (reproduced by Schneider), addressed to the CEO of Sofidif, Reza Aghazadeh, vice-president of Iran and president of the Iranian atomic energy organisation, announced the changeover of the Iranian representatives on the board of Sofidif, demonstrating their contemporary involvement.

Is this the kind of international nuclear partnership Brown wants to promote?

And on broader geopolitical energy matters Brown asserted: “Russia must maintain the obligations and commitments it makes to the international community … I do say there is another thing that has arisen from not only what has happened in Russia, but it is happening in other countries as well, we cannot allow a country like ours, given the need for energy security, to be wholly dependent on the supply of one resource. Instead of being wholly dependent on oil and gas, which of course is not going to be the best way of us proceeding as North Sea oil declines, we want a balanced energy policy, and so in my view does the rest of Europe. That will mean more nuclear building … “

Brown finds himself a curious political bedfellow with none other than the Conservative prospective parliamentary candidate for Copeland, the constituency containing Sellafield. In a letter to his local newspaper, the Whitehaven News, on September 11, Councillor Chris Whiteside wrote: “But if we don’t support nuclear or coal, how are we to keep the lights on? Are we going to rely on buying gas from Vladimir Putin? I don’t think that’s a good idea”.

You can dress up nuclear power stations however you like: they are still inevitable generators of nuclear explosives and nuclear waste, alongside electricity. Ducking under the duvet won’t change these facts, Brown.

Renewables do add up

eddie — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 17:28:32 +0000

“I can’t do the sums any way without having a slice of nuclear power in the mix. It doesn’t work. I ask my enthusiastic green friends if they’ll do the sums – and they can’t” said Professor Ian Fells on Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday. As a stalwart member of the nuclear lobby it’s unlikely Fells has many green friends. Last year we did the sums and found that through a radical rethink of how we use energy and massive investment in renewables, the UK could meet its energy needs without fossil fuels or nuclear. “The sums”, as Professor Fells calls them are contained in our report, Zero Carbon Britain.

Fells’ comments coincide with the release of his report, A Pragmatic Energy Policy for the UK. The report claims that without a nuclear revival and investment in coal the UK will face an “energy gap” within the next decade. The report also states that renewables have a role to play, but the hope that they could provide large amounts of energy is “wishful thinking” and demonstrates a “staggering lack of understanding of the technical and engineering reality of what can be built”.

Zero Carbon Britain provides exactly the “technical and engineering reality” that Professor Fells claims is missing.

The report models current UK energy demands across all sectors of the economy and assesses the potential for different renewable sources to replace fossil fuel and nuclear generation. This isn’t wishful thinking; we’ve carefully modelled exactly where and when we use energy, and how we could replace current generation with renewables. The scenario uses a broad spread of different sources – onshore and offshore wind, solar, small-scale hydro and tidal power. It’s true that the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. But we’ve mapped the UK for renewable energy potential and found that by distributing the generation around the country, using storage and managing our energy use intelligently we can even out the ups and downs in supply and demand.

Energy saving is crucial. The scenario requires us to reduce our
energy use by almost half. This won’t mean a few energy saving lightbulbs and washing your clothes at 30C. It means big changes in our energy infrastructure – switching to electric cars and public transport, serious investment to insulate our existing buildings, and rethinking how we use energy to deliver our wellbeing.

The combined threats of energy security and climate change mean that these changes need to happen quickly. The latest climate science suggests that we need to make reductions in greenhouse gases much faster than government targets – faster even than most campaigners and NGOs are calling for. If we want to avoid seriously destabilising the climate we’ve got roughly 20 years to reduce our emissions to zero. Zero Carbon Britain proves that this is technically possible. Because the timescale is so short this energy scenario only uses technology that is developed and ready to go. The urgency of the situation means we need to invest our limited resources in technologies we know are going to deliver within this 20 year timeframe.

At the Centre for Alternative Technology we produce all our electricity from our own renewable sources. I’d say we are pretty in touch with “technical and engineering reality”. We know what works and what doesn’t. We’ve been building, installing and living with these technologies for 35 years. Zero Carbon Britain shows that the UK can achieve energy security without fossil fuels and nuclear power. If Fells wants some new “enthusiastic green friends” to do the sums for him, he should come and visit.

Whitehall Farce over Nuclear Clean-up

Ellie Keen — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:12:50 +0000

Well, what do you know? Another news story has broken which demonstrates that the UK’s nuclear industry is not the robust, well-managed machine our ministers would have us believe. The government has sneaked out a report assessing the working practices of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) which is managing the clean-up of existing power stations and waste. They were clearly hoping no one would notice as there’s no doubt that many people have been caught with their pants anklewards.

Setting aside the spiralling costs of nuclear waste management (which are now about the same as the bill for the Apollo moon landings), we find the NDA in a sorry state of mismanagement. Staff apparently lack basic financial skills and were confused about accountancy terms, leading to severe errors in the balance sheets. I’m happy to report that employees in the finance team have been sent for retraining to brush up on their times tables.

It’s not just specialised knowledge that’s lacking. Simple tasks like taking notes at meetings seem to have been overlooked, to the extent that major decisions made between the NDA and the Treasury have gone unrecorded, leading to gross misunderstandings over budgets. Everyone has since agreed that it would be a good idea to write these things down and put them somewhere safe. Like a filing cabinet.

The audit goes on to say that there are "inherent risks" in the way the NDA operates, pointing out that half of its income is dependent on unreliable sources such as fuel reprocessing at Sellafield’s Thorp plant (closed since a leak was discovered in 2005) so perhaps a more stable financial model might be in order.

Given all this, investing in less volatile and more reliable sources of energy might seem appropriate. But oh dear, it looks like the government is still set on knobbling those in favour of its twin obsessions, nuclear and coal.

The proposed EU renewables directive – legislation designed to set minimum levels of energy generated from renewable sources across Europe – wants to see the UK getting 15 per cent of its energy from clean sources by 2020. A section has been included in the directive to ensure that "member states shall also provide for priority access to the grid system of electricity produced from renewable energy sources", but British ingenuity has been focused on changing "shall" to "may".

A teeny tiny change, you might think, but in practice it would remove any obligations on our government to make sure renewable sources were given access to the National Grid before others such as, well, nuclear power and coal. And it’s a stance at odds with the energy strategy launched by Gordon Brown last month which promised to "[remove] grid access as a barrier to renewables deployment". But then maybe someone didn’t take minutes at that meeting.

And I can’t finish without mentioning the fourth leak from a French nuclear power station in just two weeks. Safe, reliable energy, no doubt about it.

Nuking the Treaty

Ellie Keen — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

What is the Iranian government up to? For once the imperial coalition, overstretched in Iraq and unpopular at home, is proposing jaw, not war. The UN Security Council’s offer was a good one: if Iran suspended its uranium enrichment programme, it would be entitled to legally guaranteed supplies of fuel for nuclear power, assistance in building a light water reactor, foreign aid, technology transfer and the beginning of the end of economic sanctions(1). The United States seems prepared, for the first time since the revolution, to open a diplomatic office in Tehran(2). But in Geneva ten days ago, the Iranians filibustered until the negotiations ended(3). On Saturday President Ahmadinejad announced that Iran has now doubled the number of centrifuges it uses to enrich uranium(4). A fourth round of sanctions looks inevitable.

The unequivocal statements Barack Obama and Gordon Brown made in Israel last week about Iran’s nuclear weapons programme cannot yet be justified(5,6). Nor can the unequivocal statements by some anti-war campaigners that Iran does not intend to build the bomb. Why would a country with such reserves of natural gas and so great a potential for solar power suffer sanctions and the threat of bombing to make fuel it could buy from other states, if it accepted the UN’s terms?

Those who maintain that Iran’s purposes are peaceful clutch at the National Intelligence Estimate published by the US government in November(7). While it judged that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons programme in 2003, it saw the country’s civilian uranium programme as a means of developing “technical capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons, if a decision is made to do so.” The latest report from the International Atomic Energy Agency notes that no fissile material has been diverted from Iran’s stocks, but raises grave questions about some of the documents it has found, which suggest research into bomb-making (Iran says the papers are forgeries)(8). Those of us who oppose an attack on Iran are under no obligation to accept Ahmadinejad’s claims of peaceful intent.

Nor do we have to accept the fictions of our own representatives. The Security Council’s offer to Iran claimed that resolving this enrichment issue would help to bring about a “Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction”(9). But like every other such document, it made no mention of the principal owner of these weapons in the region: Israel. According to a leaked briefing by the US Defense Intelligence Agency, Israel possesses between 60 and 80 nuclear bombs(10). But none of the countries demanding that Iran scraps the weapons it doesn’t yet possess are demanding that Israel destroys the weapons it does possess.

This subject is the great political taboo. Neither Brown nor Obama mentioned it last week. The US intelligence agencies provide a biannual report to Congress on the weapons of mass destruction developed by foreign states, which covers Iran, North Korea, India, Pakistan and others, but not Israel(11). During a parliamentary debate in March the British defence minister Bob Ainsworth was asked whether he thought that Israel’s nuclear weapons are “a destabilising factor” in the Middle East. “My understanding,” he replied, “is that Israel does not acknowledge that it has nuclear weapons.”(12) Does Mr Ainsworth really buy this nonsense? If so, can we have a new minister? If Iran builds a bomb, it will do so for one reason: that there is already a nuclear-armed state in the Middle East, by which it feels threatened.

But we make the rules and we break them. The non-proliferation treaty (NPT) obliges the five official nuclear states, of which the United Kingdom is one, to work towards “general and complete disarmament”(13). On Friday the Guardian published the notes for a speech made last year by a senior civil servant, which suggested that the decision to replace the UK’s nuclear missiles had already been made, in secret and without parliamentary scrutiny(14,15). Since then defence ministers have told the Commons on five occasions that the decision has not yet been made(16,17,18,19,20). They appear to have misled the House.

At the Geneva conference on disarmament in February, one delegate pointed out that the “chances of eliminating nuclear weapons will be enhanced immeasurably” if non-nuclear states can see “planning, commitment and action toward multilateral nuclear disarmament by nuclear weapon states” like the UK. If the nuclear states “are failing to fulfil their disarmament obligations”, other nations would use this as an excuse for maintaining their weapons(21). Who was this firebrand? Des Browne, the Secretary of State for Defence. A man of the same name is failing to fulfil our disarmament obligations.

Browne claims that Britain must maintain its arsenal because of proliferation elsewhere, just as those proliferating elsewhere say that they must develop their arsenals because the official nuclear nations aren’t disarming. With the exception of France, none of the other European states feels the need to deploy nukes. But the UK keeps preparing for the last war. Of course, no one is refusing to disarm; it’s just that the task keeps getting pushed into the indefinite future. Opponents of British nuclear weapons maintain that a new generation of warheads would survive until 2055(22).

The permanent members of the UN Security Council draw a distinction between their “responsible” ownership of nuclear weapons and that of the aspirant powers. But over the past six years, the UK, US, France and Russia have all announced that they are prepared to use their nukes pre-emptively against a presumed threat, even from states that do not possess nuclear weapons(23,24,25,26). In some ways the current nuclear stand-off is more dangerous than the tetchy détente of the Cold War.

The danger has been heightened by the US government’s current offensive. Condoleeza Rice, the secretary of state, is demanding that other countries accept her plans to destroy the last remaining incentive for states to abide by the NPT. The treaty grants countries which conform to it materials for nuclear power on favourable terms. It’s a flawed incentive – as the spread of civil nuclear programmes makes the proliferation of military material more likely(29) – but an incentive nonetheless. Now Rice insists that India should have special access to US nuclear materials despite the fact that it has not signed the NPT and has illegally developed nuclear weapons.

If she is successful, this effort – and the concomitant US demand that India is recognised as an official nuclear power – will blow the NPT to kingdom come. The treaty which survived the Cold War, and which remains the most important of the wilting guarantees against global annihilation, is being nuked for the sake of a few billion dollars of export orders.

Here’s where it gets really depressing. The Bush administration’s proposal has been supported by both John McCain and Barack Obama(30). The contrast between Obama’s position on India and his statements on Iran could not be greater, or more destructive of the inflated hopes now vested in him.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s insistence that Iran enriches its own fissile material, and the guessing game he is playing with Israel, the atomic energy agency and the UN Security Council is irresponsible and staggeringly dangerous. But if I were in his position I might be tempted to do the same.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. UN Security Council, 12th June 2008. Letter to the Islamic Republic of Iran. http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/Infcircs/2008/infcirc730.pdf

2. Ewen MacAskill, 18th July 2008. Iran: US will seek green light to open base in Tehran. The Guardian.

3. Julian Borger, 20th July 2008. Iran given two-week deadline to end the nuclear impasse. The Observer.

4. No author given, 27th July 2008. Iran: Nuclear centrifuge total has doubled. The Observer.

5. Barack Obama, 23rd July 2008. Speech in Sderot. http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/hqblog#top

6. Gordon Brown, 21st July 2008. Speech to the Knesset. http://www.number10.gov.uk/output/Page16003.asp

7. National Intelligence Council, November 2007. National Intelligence Estimate. http://www.dni.gov/press_releases/20071203_release.pdf

8. IAEA, 26th May 2008. Implementation of the NPT SafeguardsAgreement and relevant provisions of SecurityCouncil resolutions 1737 (2006), 1747 (2007) and 1803 (2008) in the Islamic Republic of Iran. http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/Board/2008/gov2008-15.pdf

9. UN Security Council, ibid.

10. US DIA, July 1999. The Decades Ahead, 1999-202. Extracted at: http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/israel/nuke/index.html

11. Joseph Cirincione, 11th March 2005. Iran and Israel’s Nuclear Weapons.
http://www.theglobalist.com/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=3217

12. Bob Ainsworth, 26th March 2008. http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200708/cmhansrd/c…

13. Article VI. http://www.un.org/events/npt2005/npttreaty.html

14. Matthew Taylor, 25th July 2008. Britain plans to spend £3bn on new nuclear warheads. The Guardian.

15. You can see the document here: http://www.cnduk.org/index.php/press-releases/trident/secret-plan-to-rep…

16. Bob Ainsworth, 26th March 2008.

17. Des Browne, 7th January 2008.

18. Des Browne, 28th November 2007.

19. Des Browne, 19th November 2007.

20. Des Browne, 12 September 2007.

21. Des Browne, 5th February 2008. ‘Laying the Foundations for Multilateral Disarmament’. Geneva Conference on Disarmament. http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/AboutDefence/People/Speeches/SofS/2008…

22. Matthew Taylor, ibid.

23. This was first mentioned by Geoff Hoon, 24th March 2002 on The Jonathan Dimbleby Show, ITV 1, and has been reiterated several times since.

24. http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/files/pdfs/migrated/MultimediaFiles/Live/Fu…

25. No author given, 19th January 2008. Pre-Emptive Nuclear Threat Issued By Russian General Yuri Baluyevsky. Sky News. http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Sky-News-Archive/Article/20082851301432

26. Jacques Chirac, quoted by John Thornhill and Peter Spiegel, 20th January 2006. The Financial Times.

27. No author give, 26th July 2008. Condoleezza Rice Paks a proliferation punch. The Economic Times. http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/News/PoliticsNation/Condoleezza_Rice…

28. Sue Pleming, 24th July 2008. Rice says will push Congress hard on India deal. Reuters.

29. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/09/21/proliferation-treaty/

30. Elana Schor, 22nd July 2008. Q&A: India’s stalled nuclear deal with the US. The Guardian.

Whitehall Farce over Nuclear Clean-up

Ellie Keen — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

And I can’t finish without mentioning the fourth leak from a French nuclear power station in just two weeks. Safe, reliable energy, no doubt about it.

Tesco and BAA coy over lobbying in the face of evidence

tim — Mon, 19 May 2008 15:40:44 +0000

The penultimate evidence session of the current Parliamentary inquiry into lobbying offered a strange mix of obfuscation and revelation. In the first of two separate sessions were representatives of three of the UK’s most powerful companies; Lucy Neville-Rolfe for Tesco, Tom Kelly for BAA and Chris Brinsmead for AstraZeneca.

The Committee of MPs, said its chair Tony Wright, had called them in to find out what they get up to in terms of lobbying, and how they would feel about transparency regulations to open up the world of lobbying to greater public scrutiny.

The next hour and twenty minutes of questions and answers had a familiarity to it, certainly from the point of view of the Committee and anyone who’d listened to previous sessions with lobbyists. Answers were guarded, questions were side stepped and the witnesses were defensive. This despite Tony Wright’s reassurance that lobbying could be seen as a good thing, and a warning at the top of the session for the three to avoid being ‘coy’ in their responses. “Don’t come here to lobby us,” Wright advised. “I want you to tell us like it is”.

Many would be hard pushed to recognise the picture then painted by the witnesses. All three, it seems, were working not for profit, but for the public good, whether it was working to prevent climate change or helping the Government to encourage more science students. According to Neville-Rolfe, Tesco has a ‘dialogue’ with Government (it’s all about dialogue) to explain what they think should be done to help Britain. “It’s a win, win” for Tesco and the country, she said. Similarly Brinsmead saw his drug company working “to the same ends” as the NHS.

Given this ‘constructive dialogue’, one wonders why the Association of British Pharmaceutical Industry, of which Brinsmead is the President, needed to draw up a lobbying ‘battle’ plan, which Tony Wright had got his hands on. In it, according to Wright, the ABPI talked about ‘deploying ground troops’ to ‘weaken political and professional defences’, after which it planned to ‘follow through with high precision strikes on specific regulatory enclaves in Whitehall and Brussels.’ Quite a different picture of lobbying.

On the issue of the revolving door and privileged access to decision-makers, Tom Kelly, who was Tony Blair’s spokesman at No10 until he moved to BAA, suggested that MPs were vastly overstating his role in Government and therefore his access and influence. In response to a question about the size of his contacts book, Kelly – the man who replaced Alastair Campbell – replied that they extended as far as the press officers of Government departments.

All of which led Tony Wright to say, at the beginning of the next session, that it had been quite difficult to work out how central lobbying is to these three companies. The second session heard from John Sauven of Greenpeace, Owen Espley of Friends of the Earth, and Tim Hancock of Amnesty.

Information flowed much more freely during this next hour, with evidence of lobbying by BAA, Tesco and the nuclear industry all under the spotlight. The previous assertion by the corporate representatives – that open dialogue with Government was necessary for better public policy making – was also put into some doubt by Espley describing the lobbying activities of the Confederation of British Industry.

In July 2005, he explained, Friends of the Earth requested details of meetings between the CBI and the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) that had taken place shortly after the last General Election. At the time, Friends of the Earth was concerned that the CBI had been making exaggerated claims over the costs of environmental regulation, claims the Government seemed to be taking at face value. Requests by Friends of the Earth under the Freedom of Information Act of details of meetings between the CBI and the then DTI had been refused.

At the beginning of May 2008, however, the Information Tribunal ruled that the government should disclose the information, stating: “In our view, there is a strong public interest in understanding how lobbyists, particularly those given privileged access, are attempting to influence government so that other supporting or counterbalancing views can be put to government to help ministers and civil servants make best policy.” Clearly making the case for lobbying transparency regulation.

Had lobbying by the nuclear industry had an impact on the Government’s decision to support a new nuclear energy programme, the witnesses were asked by Gordon Prentice MP. John Sauven pointed to the extraordinary lobbying power of the nuclear industry just from the revolving door. Former MPs, MEPs and Ministers Jack Cunningham, Richard Caborn, Ian McCartney, Brian Wilson and Alan Donnelly are all now employed by the nuclear industry with obvious influence. By contrast, Sauven went on, the first public consultation on nuclear power had been rejected by the High Court for being deeply flawed.

One of the cases of improper lobbying Sauven recounted was the collusion that went on between the Department for Transport (DfT) and BAA over the consultation on Heathrow expansion, where the two bodies, having made their decision, then attempted to reverse engineer the outcome. This “almost fraudulent” process only came to light after sifting through a lot of requests under the Freedom of Information Act. It was only from this information that concerned MPs and campaigners were able to piece together just how embedded and how influential BAA was in the DfT.

The obvious imbalance in lobbying resources between local community groups and companies like Tesco was also raised by Espley. Quoting a report by Friends of the Earth into how supermarkets get their way in planning decisions (PDF), he described a case in Dartford where developers lobbied to change the area’s Local Plan to include specific proposals which would allow for a new Tesco. The Plan was duly changed. It was only after a Public Inquiry that permission for the new development was withdrawn, the proposals “having not been the subject of full statutory examination” in the words of the Planning Inspector.

Espley asked the Committee to remember the local communities “meeting on a wet Tuesday evening in their community centre”, without the small army of lawyers, planning specialists, PR consultants and seemingly unlimited funds Tesco and others employ. People who bother to get involved in civic matters need to know that the system is working for them too, he said. It’s not a case of corporate versus community – none of the witnesses were anti-business – merely that for the public to have faith in decision-making, there needs to be more transparency.

The sum of these two sessions finally brought some clarity to the inquiry. Back in January Paul Flynn MP, voiced his frustration with witnesses from the lobbying industry: “We’re not really getting to the truth on this,” he said. This week’s complete lack of candor from the corporates – coupled with hard evidence from experienced NGOs – exposed the Committee to some truths and the urgent need for transparency in lobbying.

The latest session can be watch on Parliament TV (available for 28 days after the session). A transcript of the session will be available on the Public Administration Select Committee’s Inquiry into Lobbying webpage.

Iran, International Peace and Security

tim — Mon, 12 May 2008 10:11:56 +0000

In a joint press conference held this week with the head of the European Commission, Mohamed ElBaradei, Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that the talks with Iran that began on April 21 to “clarify” certain “alleged studies of weaponization” have resulted in “good progress.”

What “alleged studies” is ElBaradei talking about?

Well, scroll back to the summer of 2005.

Since February, 2003, ElBaradei and his IAEA inspectors had been conducting intrusive investigations into Iran’s Safeguarded nuclear programs.

And since December, 2003, Iran had been voluntarily adhering to an (as yet) unratified Additional Protocol to its Safeguards Agreement.

Iran had searched for and provided ElBaradei documentation of its past procurement activities for nuclear programs, going back two decades – documentation that Iran had been under no obligation to provide the IAEA at the time, much less obligated to preserve for later inspection.

In that summer of 2005, ElBaradei again reported that he had found no indication that (a) there were any undeclared “source or special nuclear materials” in Iran nor that (b) “source or special nuclear materials” were being or had ever been “used in furtherance of a military purpose.” Hence, Iran was in compliance with the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

However, ElBaradei, personally, still had some “concerns” that Iran had been unwilling to address.

So, in mid-July, our intelligence officials rushed to Vienna to brief ElBaradei and senior staff on some of the sensitive “intelligence” they had gleaned from a laptop computer, allegedly stolen from a deceased Iranian engineer and obtained by our intelligence agencies from another intelligence agency sometime in 2004.

ElBaradei and staff were reportedly “unimpressed” with the documents contained on the “smoking laptop,” most of which were about “studies” involving missiles and high-explosives, which were unrelated to ElBaradei’s mission and, hence, unrelated to his “concerns.”

Nevertheless, Bonkers Bolton, the Likudniks and other neo-crazies – in and out of government – kept up the pressure on the IAEA Board of Governors and upon the UN Security Council, with the result that both passed resolutions demanding that Iran explain any and everything to ElBaradei’s satisfaction, including all the alleged “studies.”

Well, on 25 February, 2008, Olli Heinonen, IAEA Deputy Director-General for Safeguards, finally got around to showing the Iranian Ambassador to the IAEA (as well as other IAEA Ambassadors assembled) for the first time exactly what it was the Iranians were being required to explain!

It was supposed to be a confidential briefing, not to be discussed outside the IAEA, but several brief-ees promptly gave their versions of the Heinonen briefing to neo-crazy media sycophants.

According to nuclear fuel-cycle student David Albright, who had been shown the smoking laptop documents years before, the Iranians were being asked to explain four projects which were alleged to have been pursued as part of a secret military program directed an Iranian General named Mohsen Fakrizadeh.

Only one of the alleged four projects would clearly have been within the IAEA’s purview; the activities of a small Iranian private sector firm, Kimeya Madon, who, beginning in the spring of 2001 and ending in May 2003, allegedly developed a set of technical drawings for a small “bench scale” plant for converting Uranium Oxide “yellowcake” to Uranium Tetrafluoride “green salt.”

The Iranians deny that Kimeya Madon had been involved in a uranium-conversion design project. But even if it was, Iran would not have been required under its existing Safeguards Agreement to have informed the IAEA about it until six months before the plant actually began operations.

Hence, as far as ElBaradei is concerned, the real issue is whether the Iranians are truth-tellers or inveterate liars – liars who lie when there is no reason to lie.

ElBaradei already knows that virtually all intelligence provided the IAEA by our “intelligence community” has been – to put it politely – wrong.

At Deputy Heinonen’s February 2008 briefing, the Iranians were reportedly excitedly photographing everything being presented with camera phones. And a few weeks later the Iranians sent a Note Verbale to ElBaradei, incorporating a letter sent the day before to UN Secretary General regarding the Security Council’s Resolution 1803 of March 3, 2008.

UNSCR 1803 begins with the Security Council –

“Reaffirming its commitment to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, the need for all States Party to that Treaty to comply fully with all their obligations, and recalling the right of States Party, in conformity with Articles I and II of that Treaty, to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination.”

The Security Council then proceeds to discriminate, to deny Iran the “inalienable rights” it has just “reaffirmed.”

So, Iran’s letter to Secretary General begins by noting – correctly – that Iran “has consistently complied with its obligations” under the NPT and the IAEA Statute.

It then notes the “irrational opposition” of the United States and the Brits-Germans-French to Iran’s exercising its “inalienable rights” as affirmed in the NPT and IAEA Statute, and charges that their “instrumental manipulation” of the IAEA Board and Security Council have resulted in international law and the UN Charter being “seriously violated.”

Iran goes on to charge that the U.S.-Brits-Germans-French have provided “erroneous information” with the result that the IAEA has been prevented from fulfilling “its real tasks on important issues such as the prevention of actual [nuke] proliferation, disarmament and developing a mechanism to effectively verify the nuclear activities of the non-parties to the NPT, particularly the Zionist regime that is continuing to develop nuclear weapons in the [Mid-East] region.”

Iran then reminds the Secretary General of the substantive and procedural legal requirements set out in the IAEA Safeguards Agreements, the IAEA Statute and the UN Charter for involving the Security Council in issues related to Iran’s Safeguarded nuclear programs.

In particular, Iran correctly notes that “there has never been any reference in the Agency’s reports to any non-compliance by Iran or and diversion in its peaceful nuclear activities. On the contrary, “the IAEA Director-General has repeatedly stressed that there has been no diversion of the declared nuclear materials.” And the IAEA Statute requires the IAEA Board to “find” that the Director-General has not been able to verify there has been no diversion before referring the matter to the Security Council.

Hence, Iran finds it “necessary to stress that the engagement of the Security Council in this issue – and also the resolutions adopted in this regard – have been unlawful.”

In conclusion, Iran notes that “the maintenance and strengthening of international peace and security requires, as a first step, our endeavor to ensure a safer world through developing equitable international rules, and through their evenhanded implementation.”

And so say all of us.

Green vs Green

tim — Thu, 01 May 2008 13:15:25 +0000

Environmentalists are used to fighting battles. But with environmentalism going mainstream – wind farms, biofuels and nuclear power stations, for example, are fast becoming some of the most controversial issues in British politics today – environmentalists increasingly find themselves skirmishing with one another as they see-saw between pragmatism and idealism.

The Lewis wind farm – rejected by the Scottish Executive earlier this week – is merely the latest example. The Scotsman reported that “environmental agencies welcomed the news” of the massive wind power project’s demise, thanks to concerns about impacts on rare peat bog and birdlife habitat. Yet according to the developers Lewis Wind Power – a coalition of AMEC and British Energy – the wind farm would have made a substantial contribution to reducing Britain’s greenhouse gas emissions, wiping out a quarter of a million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions every year. With climate change at the top of the list of political priorities, most now agree that Britain desperately needs to expand its renewables sector. How this can be done without major negative impacts on wildlife and landscape remains one of today’s toughest challenges.

Wildlife groups such as the RSPB have a particularly difficult task in deciding where they stand. The Lewis wind farm’s impact on the landscape would have been substantial – with 181 turbines each standing 140 metres tall, erected on massive concrete bases drilled into the fragile peat surface and connected by dozens of miles of new stone roads, this was unavoidable. And while the developers insisted that strenuous efforts would be made to mitigate the effect on birds, including not putting turbines in areas important to rare species such as merlins and golden eagles, the RSPB objected strongly to the proposal.

Yet the real-world result of defeating the wind farm is that the electricity that would have been generated cleanly from the wind will now be generated using conventional means – a mixture of coal and gas. This in turn will worsen climate change, which will in the long run have a far more serious effect on fragile habitats such as Lewis’ peat moors than any number of wind turbines, as temperatures rise and rainfall patterns shift. Indeed, global warming is now thought by many biodiversity experts to be the greatest extinction threat facing the planet today. Up to a half of all species could be consigned to oblivion with just two or three degrees of further warming.

But with wind farms consistently opposed by a powerful coalition of conservationists and locals concerned about the landscape impact of turbines, it is difficult to see how the planned emissions cuts – or indeed the new renewables target of 15% of UK energy by 2020 – can even be approached. The Lewis project, although supported by the Western Isles Council, received 11,000 objections from members of the public, with only 100 comments in favour. Lewis Wind Power responded to the news of its project’s refusal by saying that it was “bitterly disappointed”. Similarly, the British Wind Energy Association – environmentalists all – is furious that £5m has been wasted on a failed scheme, and warns that this will damage investor confidence in new wind projects.

Conservation bodies such as the RSPB are, of course, well aware of the global warming threat – the RSPB was a founding member of the environment and development agency coalition Stop Climate Chaos, and has also launched its own green electricity tariff, RSPB Energy, in partnership with electricity company Scottish and Southern, to supply consumers with renewable electricity, much of it generated from wind.

Some contradiction perhaps? RSPB doesn’t think so. “We are committed to tackling climate change,” it says. But “we cannot support any renewable generation proposal which would have a significant and adverse impact on wildlife and habitats, particularly sites which are protected by law specifically for their wildlife value.”

It denies that there is a conflict between meeting renewables targets and protecting wildlife. But this conflict keeps on happening. The biggest single source of renewable power in the UK would be the tidal barrage that is proposed across the Severn estuary – it could potentially generate 5% of the country’s entire supply. But building it would have severe ecological consequences on the tidal mudflats, which host a panoply of aquatic life and wading birds – and once again, the RSPB, this time supported by Friends of the Earth (FoE), is strongly in the anti camp. FoE has proposed an alternative system of tidal lagoons, but these would generate less power and might not be economically feasible. Jonathon Porritt’s Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) last year proposed building the barrage but ensuring that compensatory habitats were established elsewhere for displaced wildlife – especially if these new habitats could help birds and other species adapt to rising sea levels and other impacts of climate change.

What is clear is that all energy-generation technologies have an impact on the environment – and environmentalists are going to have to think more deeply about what their hierarchy of priorities is. For example, nuclear and hydro power were both anathema to environmentalists for decades but are slowly and reluctantly being accepted back into the fold due to their perceived potential for producing low-carbon energy. The nuclear option was recently considered by the SDC – and although it was still ruled out on cost and proliferation grounds, its report did have to concede that “nuclear is a low carbon technology”, which “could generate large quantities of electricity, contribute to stabilising CO2 emissions and add to the diversity of the UK’s energy supply”.

This is a world away from Greenpeace’s flat refusal to even consider moving away from its outright and long-standing rejection of nuclear power. Similarly on biofuels, even as environmental campaign groups lobby against the new government-sponsored biofuels mandate (a reversal from their favourable position a few years ago), the Royal Society still insists that biofuels “have a potentially useful role in tackling the issues of climate change and energy supply”.

All this suggests that environmental concerns of a generation ago – which were conservation-based, principally – are increasingly being trumped by the climate-change concerns of today. Indeed, if climate change does come top of the list, given its potential to devastate both biodiversity and the British landscape, then it certainly needs to be given more weight in planning decisions.

As Sir Martin Doughty, chairman of Natural England, said in response to the SDC’s Severn Barrage proposals: “We have some difficult choices to make if we are going to get serious about reducing the impact of climate change on the natural environment.” And making these difficult choices means knowing what we value most, and how to protect it.

BBC documentary reveals government reckless in drive for nuclear weapons

tim — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:22:01 +0000

In a recently aired documentary, “Windscale: Britain’s Biggest Nuclear Disaster,” the BBC investigated the history of the first British nuclear power station and its role in the development of nuclear weapons. It presented strong evidence that the Windscale fire of 1957—the first fire in any nuclear facility—was caused by the flagrant abandonment of safety measures. This took place because of pressure from the British government to produce bomb-making material. The programme explained how the 1957 fire brought Windscale to the brink of a major nuclear disaster, in which many of the people working there could have been killed and a wide area around the site left contaminated for decades.

There were interviews with key scientists and operators from the time, such as Tom Tuohy (Windscale deputy general manager), Terence Price (reactor physicist) and John Harris (scientific officer). Previously undisclosed material was used, including taped interviews conducted directly after the fire.

There was a “heady” mood when the Windscale project was in its infancy in the late 1940s. The nearby village of Seascale suddenly became “the brainiest place in Britain.” Most of the newcomers were young graduates and postgraduates, hailed in the media as “atom men” who would bring in a new age of scientific and technological achievement in which people would have better lives. In contrast to the image created for Windscale by the media, the programme showed that its real purpose was “to make bombs.”

After the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US at the end of the Second World War, Winston Churchill was determined to establish a “special relationship” between the “British Commonwealth and Empire” and the United States. He believed this was justified by the role of British scientists in the development of the atom bomb at Los Alamos, but the US government did not agree. “You helped, but we did it,” said a US nuclear historian. In 1946, the US passed a law making it a capital offence to pass nuclear secrets to any other nation, even to former allies.

This threw the post-war Labour government, led by Clement Attlee, into a crisis. Labour ministers Stafford Cripps, Hugh Dalton and others advised Attlee that Britain could not compete with the US and had nothing to gain by trying. However, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevan was determined to preserve Britain’s imperial might. “We have got to have this thing whatever it costs and we have got to have the bloody Union Jack flying on top of it,” he declared.

Labour’s aim was to shore up Britain’s position on the world stage by the development and use of high-technology weaponry so as to persuade America that Britain was its natural nuclear ally.

To do so, the UK had to repeat—“at enormous cost”—the experiments already done in US. Three men were appointed to drive the work forward: John Cockroft, to lead the team at the Harwell Atomic Energy Research Centre; Christopher Hinton, to build a nuclear reactor at Windscale; and William Penney (who had played a key role at Los Alamos), to build the bomb at Aldermaston.

The Soviet Union was expected to have developed an atomic bomb by 1952. In view of this, the British government imposed 1952 as the deadline for the Windscale project. This meant overriding the timescale set by Hinton, who was mindful of the project’s experimental nature and wanted to ensure that the reactor would be safe. Thus, building work began at Windscale before the research work at Harwell had been completed.

A nuclear reactor requires constant cooling to avoid the danger of fire, because of the quantity of heat produced by nuclear fission. To be kept cool, the uranium has to be placed inside aluminium rods, housed in hundreds of channels drilled through a graphite core. The US used a constant stream of water to keep the rods cool. However, if the water supply failed, it could lead to an uncontrollable chain reaction, similar to an atomic bomb. In the US, the reactor was built in an uninhabited desert region with a 30-mile long escape road and it was considered an acceptable risk.

No such isolated site existed in Britain. Instead a cooling system was devised that used huge fans to drive air up through the reactor and out through an enormous chimney. Using this design, it was considered acceptable to build the reactor near the village of Seascale on the Cumbrian coast in the northwest of England. Work began there on Britain’s largest engineering project.

A year into the design and construction of the plant, Terence Price (working at Harwell) asked the crucial question, “What would happen if a uranium rod set on fire?” The BBC programme explained that a burning fuel rod could fill the air with radioactive particles, which the powerful cooling system would discharge through its 400-foot chimney. Price proposed the installation of filters to reduce this danger. This was initially rejected, and Price was told, “Don’t be silly lad! Two tons of material is going to go up through the chimney every hour, how can you filter that?”

However, his arguments were taken up by Cockroft, and massive concrete filters were built and positioned on top of tower. Until the time of the fire, they were known as “Cockcroft’s follies.”

In 1951, after five years of work, the Windscale project was completed just 10 days behind schedule. It was now a big producer of plutonium, but not enough for an atomic bomb. The only way to increase production was to allow the uranium to become even hotter by clipping off all the fins from the aluminium rods. John Harris, a scientist employed at Windscale, explained that while some scientists thought it “great that we were getting enough plutonium” for “Queen and country,” there was a substantial group who considered it an unacceptable risk. Nevertheless, the entire half million fins were clipped off.

In August 1952, the first plutonium left Windscale for Aldermaston, and later that year, the first British atomic bomb was tested in the Montebello Islands, off the northwest coast of Australia. The political elite declared it to be a “triumph of British engineering.” But within weeks, the US had tested a new and even more deadly weapon—the hydrogen bomb (H-bomb)—with 10 times the destructive capacity of the British bomb. The trump card had been trumped. Worse still, the US was refusing to share the technology. Within two years, Churchill, who had become the head of a Conservative government the previous year, gave the order to make a British H-bomb—thereby setting Windscale on the path to a major fire.

The plant was now faced with producing tritium (a radioactive isotope of hydrogen) by further modifying the fuel rods in a now ageing reactor that had only been designed to produce plutonium. Despite the risks, magnesium/lithium isotope cartridges were added to the fuel rods.

For some time, the reactor core had been behaving unpredictably. The rods had been producing unexpected bursts of energy, leading to sudden heating and the danger of fire. The scientists and engineers on site were carrying out controlled releases of the stored energy known as “Wigner releases.” This involved allowing the core to heat up for a limited period, in the expectation that the energy accumulating in the rods would convert to heat that could be released in a controlled way.

New problems occurred when some of the rods became fused into the back of the reactor, so that the operators had to dislodge them using scaffolding rods. Later, men had to use shovels to remove the radioactive material and were exposed to dangerous levels of radioactivity in the process.

On October 17, 1956, Calder Hall nuclear power station opened just a few yards from Windscale. It was hailed as the first nuclear power station in the world, which would produce electricity that was “too cheap to meter.” What the public was not told was that Calder Hall was secretly helping Windscale to produce more of the material needed to meet the demands of the H-bomb programme.

Around this time, Frank Lesley, a research scientist at Windscale, recorded high levels of radioactivity around the village of Seascale. The government was informed, but issued an order that it was to be kept secret, even from those making decisions about the reactor’s future.

In 1957, an international conference in Geneva proposed that 1958 should be the deadline for a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. What followed was a scramble by the British government to speed up the drive for the H-bomb, so that it could be tested before the treaty came into force.

Britain’s first H-bomb test was a failure.

To buy time, the new Tory prime minister, Harold Macmillan, decided to produce a much bigger version of an atom bomb called “Orange Herald” that would have almost as much destructive power as an H-bomb. The new bomb required massive amounts of plutonium and tritium, so the demand on Windscale was increased by 500 percent. To achieve this, aluminium was removed from the cartridges, making them even more likely to overheat.

Hinton, the chief scientist at Windscale, resigned within weeks of the Orange Herald test. The government then ordered Penney to carry out a second H-bomb test.

On October 10, 1957, Macmillan wrote to US President Dwight Eisenhower urging him to accept Britain as America’s nuclear ally. On the same day, a serious fire broke out at Windscale.

Three days earlier, workers monitoring the temperature gauges had noticed that the reactor core was heating up, so they ordered a Wigner release to try and cool it down. The release did not have the expected result. A second Wigner release was ordered (a course of action that had been used before) and the air-cooling increased to take away the released heat. But the core heated up again unexpectedly, and high levels of radioactivity were detected. The view of the operators was that it was a badly burst fuel cartridge. In reality, one of the cartridges had caught fire.

The increased airflow following the Wigner release caused this fire to spread to many of the other fuel rods. A huge fire enveloped the reactor, “like setting a match to a piece of paper.” It had become a “blazing inferno,” with radioactive material being pumped out into the air.

There was no emergency plan for dealing with a fire situation. “Mankind had not faced a situation like this; we had to play it by ear,” one interviewee said. The residents of Seascale village were completely unaware of what was going on, since no official warning was issued.

Knowing that any wrong move could precipitate a nuclear explosion, a number of approaches to putting out the fire were tried. All of them failed. The area around the reactor was cleared and water pumped in. When that also failed, as a last resort, the airflow used to cool the fuel rods was shut off. Within minutes the fire subsided and the temperature began to fall. Due to the actions taken by the scientists and operators, the danger of a major nuclear disaster had been averted.

The local inhabitants were assured that there was no danger of nuclear contamination because the wind was blowing it out to sea. One of the scientists interviewed questioned whether this was true. Nevertheless, all the cow’s milk produced was poured away in an area of 200 square miles.

Immediately after the fire, the press hailed the Windscale men as heroes. However, only a few months later, the operators were being blamed for the fire occurring, as Macmillan tried to shift the blame away from the government and preserve the possibility of being accepted as a nuclear ally of the US. Even an official report, drawn up by Penney under Macmillan’s direction, was considered too close to the truth, in attributing the cause of the fire to modifications made to produce tritium for the H-bomb. The report was suppressed, and instead, a government White Paper was issued that blamed the fire on the operators’ “error of judgement” in carrying out the second Wigner release. On the day the White Paper was published, Britain’s first successful H-bomb test was carried out in the South Pacific.

Iran's Struggle for a More Equitable World Order

tim — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 13:18:27 +0000

Iran does not deserve the hostility of, and is no threat to, the United States. In fact, the West’s current obsession with Iran is fueled by little more than Iran’s rejection of double standards in international relations. Accusations that Iran will develop nuclear weapons come most forcefully from sources that lied about Iraq. Even the US intelligence agencies’ claim that Iran had a clandestine nuclear weapons project until 2003 fails for lack of evidence.

Despite years of arm-twisting by Washington, UN inspectors on the ground have found no trace of nuclear weapons intentions in Iran. The accusers, on the other hand, have violated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by rejecting Iran’s invitation to participate in Iran’s nonmilitary nuclear sector and by refusing to eliminate their massive stockpiles. Worse yet, the US is designing small “tactical” nuclear weapons for use against non-nuclear states.

Among the accusers, Israel has, with US approval, built a nuclear arsenal but refuses to join the Treaty or allow inspections. Another nuclear outlaw, India, has been promised American nuclear technology assistance. Based on known facts, then, the US is the world’s leading proliferator.

Iran’s nuclear program was in fact prompted in the 1950s by Washington, shortly after the CIA overthrew the country’s revered secular prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh. During the 70s Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz led a Ford administration drive to sell Iran a half-dozen reactors. Iran’s electricity needs were a quarter of what they are today, but they did not insist then as they do today that Iran has enough oil and gas to generate power.

Iran has not attacked another country in more than two centuries, and it developed powerful missiles only after the US banned the sale of air force jets to Iran by all suppliers. Harsh rhetoric aside, Iran spends less per capita on its military than most countries in the region do. It can not possibly challenge the legendary military superiority of Israel, which fears US-Iranian reconciliation would diminish its strategic value to Washington and therefore make the occupation of Palestinian lands politically untenable.

Iran helped create Hezbollah in Lebanon but no longer directs its actions, according to most knowledgeable analysts. In Iraq, the White House has produced zero evidence to back its claim that Iranian infiltration contributes to the deaths of US troops. Iraqi president and prime minister have often praised Iran’s role in Iraq. Washington, on the other hand, is funding terror groups that aim to destabilize Iran, according to Seymour Hersch and ABC’s Brian Ross.

If keeping Tehran from possibly contemplating nuclear weapons is a US priority, why not stop threatening Iran so the least reasonable elements in its policy circles remain marginal? Why did the White House dismiss Iran’s formal offer in 2003 to negotiate about all outstanding issues? And why ignore Tehran’s offer earlier this month to permit extra-intrusive inspections (the “Additional Protocol”) if Iran’s file is sent back from the UN Security Council to the International Atomic Energy Agency?

The answer lies in Washington’s bipartisan insistence to replace the Cold War with a world order that includes no rivals large or small, as articulated in the official National Security Strategy of the United States in 2002 and reaffirmed in 2006. Iran, along with Russia, China, Venezuela, and other assertive nations are equally determined to resist the empire and steer the world towards a multi-polar order.

To American leaders, China in particular is an awakening “menace” that is on track to rival the US in two decades, unless its dependence on imported energy can be exploited against it. But an American chokehold on the global energy market is not easy as long as Iran, located strategically between the world’s largest oil and gas reserves in Central Asia and Persian Gulf, refuses to take orders.

Thus it is the US insistence on domination, rather than any legitimate national security worries, that underlies Washington’s obsessive push to marginalize and destabilize Iran.

The antiwar movement should demand that the White House initiate a wide-ranging, unconditional, and sustained dialog with Iran to test its sincerity. American activists can also make war with Iran less likely by insisting that the International Atomic Energy Agency, rather than the UN Security Council, be the arbiter of Iran’s nuclear file.

Editor’s note: Rostam Pourzal is a member of the US board of the Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran. The preceeding text is of his presentation in Atlanta on April 11, 2008 at the biennial conference of Historians Against the War, which boasts two thousand members in 400 colleges and universities. In an unprecedented step last month, the American Historical Association, the nation’s oldest and largest society of historians, adopted HAW’s proposed resolution against the Iraq War.

Why Britain Doesn't Need Nuclear Power

Ellie Keen — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 00:55:57 +0000

This article was first published in the New Statesman.

Three years ago I lost quite a few friends by writing an article for the New Statesman suggesting that new nuclear plants, while not an energy panacea, could have a role in Britain’s future. Earlier this month, the government, too, lost a few green friends by completing its long-heralded volte-face on the nuclear issue.

The announcement was met with predictable howls of indignation from the Green Party and from Greenpeace. Clearly, the issue is just as polarised today as it was when I first tackled it in May 2005. Both sides are still throwing out biased information to support preconceived positions, leaving the public confused and dismayed. However, polls show that public opinion is shifting: most people are no longer anti-nuclear, largely because of fears about climate change and energy security.

Some of the anti arguments are also obviously wrong, and don’t get any less so simply because they are constantly repeated. I keep hearing that nuclear is not low-carbon because of the greenhouse gases emitted during the construction of plants and refining and transportation of fuel. But the same criticism goes for any centralised power generator. The same goes for the argument, often heard from Greenpeace, that nuclear displaces only moderate amounts of CO2 because it generates only electricity, not energy, and is therefore irrelevant for reducing emissions from heating or transport. True, but you could make the same case against wind or solar (they don’t).

Nor is it fair to dismiss nuclear as simply “too expensive”. If E.ON, RWE or Npower is convinced that new reactors will provide a fair return on a hefty capital investment, that is their decision. In a free market, we don’t need environmental groups to second-guess energy investment decisions made in every corporate boardroom. Environmental groups are supposed to focus on factors other than value for money.

Still, the UK is endowed with some of the best renewable resources in the world (particularly wind and wave, as well as tidal) and could become both a technology market leader and a major energy exporter if only the political will and economic muscle could be mobilised to make this happen. The proposal by the Energy Secretary, John Hutton, in December – to open our seas to 33 gigawatts of offshore wind energy (enough to power all the UK’s homes) – is a welcome sign that government thinking is shifting in this direction. The last thing we need now is for this momentum to be lost because of a huge diversion of political energy into justifying new nuclear power stations and battling environmentalists. Nuclear reactors can be built anywhere, and make far more sense in countries where renewables are less freely available than here. Because of our geographical position and shallow continental shelves, we could be the Saudi Arabia of windpower. It is countries like China that should be encouraged to construct a fleet of new reactors, in order to try to wean them off the dirtiest and most dangerous fuel of all: coal.

The worst of all possible options would be to allow new-build coal on our own shores. Not only would that put us in a weak position for lecturing the Chinese, but it would commit billions of pounds of investment into an energy source that will produce millions of tonnes of CO2 over the decades ahead. Companies such as E.ON, which is proposing two new coal-fired units at its Kingsnorth plant, try to wriggle out of this contradiction by claiming that their new coal-power stations will be “capture-ready”. But if they really believe in carbon capture and storage as a solution to fossil-fuel emissions, they should build it now. E.ON and its competitors should be encouraged to invest their billions in wind, wave and tidal power instead – with government regulatory support and subsidy as necessary.

It is utterly shameful that the UK languishes at the bottom of the renewable energy league despite our huge resources. We need to turn this situation around, and quickly. Nuclear power is fine in principle, but it is not a priority for us.