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Wales finding ways to resist UK nuclear power plants

Nuclear fall out, Syniadau , 17 April 2010, “…….we have three parties in the Assembly who are opposed to nuclear power in Wales, about two-thirds of voters altogether. Yet if you vote for Labour you will get what their leaders in Westminster want in order to meet England’s energy needs … for even Labour acknowledge that Wales can produce twice the electricity we need from renewables.

If England needs the energy, and the people of England decide that they want nuclear energy to be a part of that, then they should be free to do so. But if they do, those power stations should be built in England, and England must pay for all the risks and costs involved………..

there is another way of fighting to stop nuclear power: the Tories in Westminster have said that any new generation of nuclear plants must not be subsidized by the taxpayer. This is what it says in their manifesto:

To limit harmful emissions from UK power stations, we will take steps to encourage new low carbon energy production, including:

•  clearing the way for new nuclear power stations – provided they receive no public subsidy

Conservative Manifesto

Now of course the Tories may have a whole raft of ways to by which they can hide such subsidies if they chose to. But Labour have already done precisely that by including the potential nuclear power industry within the scope of Strategic Investment Fund and also intend to use the Green Investment Bank they would set up to help finance the nuclear industry. That certainly constitutes “public subsidy”. At a time when we are up to our ears in public debt, we certainly can’t afford to increase public debt even further by bailing out energy firms to provide a source of electricity that Wales doesn’t even need….

the only way to guarantee that the costs [of eventual decommissioning and waste disposal] will still be met if the company folds is for them to put the money up front, in the form of some sort of bond, perhaps backed by insurance. This happens in the construction industry, but the costs involved in nuclear clean up are way beyond that scale … not least because it’s virtually impossible to predict how much something will cost in maybe 40 years time. So the Labour Government have been trying to run with a compromise mechanism called “Funded Decommissioning” which, in order to make the cost in any way affordable for private companies, seeks to put limits on their liabilities…….

if we stand firm on the basic principle that whoever wants to build a nuclear power station must ensure that the full cost of decommissioning and waste storage is met without public subsidy—irrespective of whether they go bust at some time in the future—no private company will go ahead with construction because they simply would not be able to afford to provide that sort of binding, enforceable guarantee. Syniadau :: The Blog: Nuclear fall out

April 19, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, UK | antinuclear, nuclear, nuclear costs, nuclear spin, nuclear technology, nuclear wastes, reactors, renewable energy, renewables