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Almost under the blue-green dome of Britain’s first pressurised-water
reactor, now nearing completion on the flat shoreline of Suffolk, is a
purpose-built Job Centre. It was set up originally to hire thousands of
people to build the PWR, Sizewell B. It now has a different role, to find
jobs elsewhere in the country for staff being laid off, their work done.
Britain’s construction industry has little else to offer, least of all
building nuclear power plants. A few specialists will go overseas, for others
the only future is unskilled work or the dole.

At the moment, more than 4000 people work on the Sizewell B site, a
buzz of activity. ‘In a year’s time, all this will be gone,’ says Len Green,
a veteran power station engineer who runs public relations at the site.
‘The staff will have run down from the maximum of 5300 to about 350 to operate
the plant. All the time, we’re losing expertise as the team disperses.’
With them, says Nuclear Electric, a state-owned company that operates most
of Britain’s nuclear power stations, will go the country’s hopes of sustaining
a credible nuclear engineering industry.

If the company had its way, it would instead begin work on a new PWR
next door, a double reactor called Sizewell C, capable of generating 2600
megawatts, twice as much as Sizewell B. This would take over from the site’s
first reactor, Sizewell A, a 580-megawatt gas-cooled magnox plant commissioned
in 1966, when it reaches the end of its life in 2002. The location has other
advantages; it is connected to the southern portion of Britain’s energy
grid, where electricity companies say there is a shortage of power stations.
More important, the local population is comparatively friendly to nuclear
energy, which has kept unemployment far lower than in the rest of Suffolk.
Building a new plant would maintain these jobs to 2004, at least. It would
also give continuity to Britain’s nuclear programme and open the way towards
exporting expertise and equipment.

Sizewell B, the industry claims, shows that Britain can build internationally
competitive nuclear plants. Nuclear Electric says the plant will be commissioned
by May 1994, at least six months ahead of schedule (and, at £2.8
billion at today’s prices, it claims within budget after almost six years’
construction work). Although, as engineers admit, the most difficult part,
fuelling and testing under radio-active conditions, is yet to come, that
is an unusual performance for a large civil engineering project in Britain.
While the reactor is based on an American design, with the pressure vessel
made in France, more than 3000 British firms contributed to the project.

But since November 1989, it has been government policy not to build
any more nuclear plants. Within the next few months, the government’s review
of this embargo will decide irrevocably whether the nuclear industry, which
British scientists and engineers pioneered, will go the way of microchips
and shipbuilding. Ministers will shortly announce exactly what the review
will cover, and when. Despite the embargo, Nuclear Electric has applied
for planning permission for Sizewell C; the company says that, should the
embargo be lifted, it wants to be able to get the project off the ground
quickly.

The nuclear freeze and the review resulted from the privatisation of
the British electricity industry, in 1989. The original plan was to sell
off nuclear plants along with the other assets of the old Central Electricity
Generating Board. But the process nearly foundered when it emerged that
the cost of dismantling Britain’s first generation of nuclear plants, magnox
reactors, was higher than the CEGB had estimated – and far higher than private
investors would countenance.

The rude awakening forced the government to leave Nuclear Electric state-owned
and subsidised by a levy on sales of electricity generated by power companies
that burn fossil fuels, which amounted to £1.3 billion in 1992-93,
while the rest of the industry was sold off. It was an uncomfortable compromise
for a government that claimed to base its energy policy on market forces.

The review, originally promised within five years, is supposed to sort
out the mess. But officials hint that it is likely instead to look at the
narrow question of whether the next generation of nuclear plants will be
cost-effective. If it decides that they are – and the Department of Trade
and Industry’s last wide-ranging energy study, the Coal Review, published
in March, found no economic reason for reducing nuclear capacity – it will
remove the embargo on construction and let private industry get on with
it.

Poor investment

In practical terms, that means the freeze will continue. Activists on
both sides of the debate say that City institutions would be unlikely to
fund nuclear power stations. ‘If you’ve got £2 billion to invest,
you can make more money by doing almost anything than building nuclear power
stations,’ says Simon Roberts, energy campaigner with Friends of the Earth,
which last month celebrated 20 years of campaigning against nuclear energy
in Britain.

On the other side, John Gittus, director-general of the British Nuclear
Industry Forum, which represents 72 organisations in the business, says
he fears a ‘limp-wristed approach’ that would allow nuclear power to wither
in competition with cheap fossil fuels. ‘My personal fear is that the review
will not be sufficiently far-reaching. If all the government does is say
‘okay, you can build new nuclear power stations if you can find the money
to do it,’ that will not be enough.’ He would like the government to follow
the French example and guarantee loans for nuclear power stations to ease
the transition of the nuclear industry to the private sector.

The finances of Nuclear Electric suggest that the nuclear industry will
need significant support. Although the company made an operating profit
of £661 million in 1992/93, up 37 per cent from the previous year,
only 53 per cent of income comes from selling electricity. The rest is from
the levy, and without the levy the company would be bankrupt. Nevertheless,
John Collier, Nuclear Electric’s chairman, is bullish: ‘We are firmly on
target to record an operating profit before taking account of income from
the levy in 1995/96.’

Friends of the Earth describes the profits as ‘an illusion conjured
up by massive public subsidies and protected markets’. The City agrees.
In July, when Nuclear Electric announced its latest results, The Daily Telegraph’s
share-tipster said that ‘investors will continue to flee at the mere thought’
of nuclear power stations. Insurance premiums and the cost of decommissioning
reactors would add to the risk.

The Office of Electricity Regulation (OFFER) estimates that a unit of
electricity costs 3.2p to generate in a coal-fired power station and as
little as 2.7p in one fired by gas. According to Nuclear Electric, its overall
unit costs last year were 3.6p, though electricity generated from its advanced
gas-cooled reactors cost 2.9p. For private investors today, it makes more
sense to build power stations burning cheap natural gas, or to import electricity
from France’s subsidised nuclear power industry.

The result would be a gap of decades between the completion of Sizewell
B and the opening of more nuclear stations in Britain. Nuclear engineers
say that would be a monumental failure in industrial policy; a product of
the same thinking that an economy could be based on selling fast food and
plastic Beefeaters at the Tower of London. Without a clear government commitment,
stresses Gittus, the nuclear industry will become another abandoned resource.

Yet for the government, that might be the safest course. Political
support is almost absent outside a handful of MPs whose constituencies depend
on the nuclear industry for employment. The Conservative government of Margaret
Thatcher was heavily pro-nuclear, but largely as a means of defeating the
power coal miners. Following a year-long strike in 1984 and the subsequent
shrinking of the coal industry, miners are no longer a political force.
Nigel Lawson, a former chancellor of the exchequer and energy minister who
was one of the architects of Britain’s market-led energy policy, has since
slammed the ‘phoney economics of nuclear power’. Labour still sees it as
a threat to coal; the Liberal Democrats are historically anti-nuclear.

Environmentalists, apart from mavericks such as James Lovelock, originator
of the Gaia hypothesis, usually see nuclear power as the archenemy. In an
interview last year Lovelock described nuclear power as a ‘scapegoat’ for
the environmental movement, which he said would be better occupied in fighting
the motor car. ‘Anything nuclear power’s done is complete innocence by comparison.
I have sympathy with the Greens, but they tend to pick on the wrong culprit.’

Balanced policy

Green opposition stems partly from nuclear power’s origins, in weaponry,
and partly from the environmental movement’s own genesis – Greenpeace’s
first campaigns were against bomb tests. But there are strong arguments
for a balanced energy policy that includes nuclear power.

One reason is diversity. The BNIF says that Britain needs to build three
new reactors by 2005 to maintain a balanced energy policy, of which nuclear
power would contribute between 20 and 25 per cent. It is unlikely to get
them. So over the next few years, dependence on fossil fuels will actually
increase as new gas-fired power stations take over from magnox reactors,
which provide about 15 per cent of Britain’s electricity.

This is environmental craziness, says Green. Gas is too precious a fuel
to burn up in large static power stations. The World Energy Council estimates
that less than 65 years’ worth is in the ground. It would be much better
to use it as a transport fuel, or feedstock for chemicals, for which there
is no practical alternative to hydrocarbons.

It is also irresponsible to emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere
unnecessarily, adds Green. This, of course, is nuclear power’s environmental
trump card. Nuclear Electric says its power stations, contributing 21.6
per cent of England and Wales’ electricity, avoided the emission of 55 million
tonnes of carbon dioxide in 1992/93. ‘We are major contributors to the environmental
wellbeing of this country,’ says Collier. Gittus says that nuclear power
is the only option if Britain is paying to anything more than lip service
to its international promises to reduce polluting emissions of carbon dioxide
and acid rain.

Friends of the Earth counters that it would be more cost-effective to
switch to more efficient uses of electricity. Nuclear power, it claims,
comes sixteenth in the list of ‘CO₂-abatement options in order
of cost-effectiveness’. But conservation alone will not produce electricity
in the quantities needed to run, for instance, a decent electric rail system,
which is another element of a sane environmental policy.

The other side to the environmental coin is radiation. Despite the efforts
of the industry to promote radioactivity as a natural phenomenon, people
are afraid of it, though the BNIF says that polls suggest genetic engineering
is taking over as a number one bogey. Fair enough; public apprehension keeps
nuclear power stations on their toes. But the bald fact is that virtually
none of the radiation that bombards us in daily life comes from nuclear
power stations. Exposure to cosmic radiation in an hour-long airline flight
gives four times the radiation dose an ordinary individual receives from
the nuclear industry in a year. Few people would seek to ban civil aviation
on those grounds.

But what about the risk of catastrophe? In the past, the nuclear industry
did itself no favours by saying that a big accident could not happen. That
always rang hollow; especially as some facts about the Windscale fire in
1957 (at a plutonium-producing reactor for weapons research and manufacturing,
not a commercial power plant) took decades to emerge. After Chernobyl, despite
the great differences in design, backups and operating procedures between
British and Russian reactors, that simply will not wash. Today, the BNIF’s
answer is: ‘No part of the energy business is free of danger. Whether it
be a coal mine, a drilling rig, a gas main, oil tanker or dam – every part
of the power industry is vulnerable to accident and works hard to prevent
it. Nuclear power is no different, and, despite what some people think,
its safety record stands with the best.’

And what would happen if an unpredictable chain of events did cause
a PWR to explode? It might kill dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people
and, possibly, cause damage to succeeding generations. But although we prefer
not to think about it, death and disaster are trade-offs we make with other
technological ‘advances’. Motor cars kill nearly 5000 people a year in
Britain. Electricity in the home caused 77 deaths in 1991 according to the
Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents. And the jury is still out
on the genetic effects of such developments as pesticides, electromagnetic
radiation and biotechnology.

The issue bothering most objectors, and which figures most in the press,
is that of waste. At Friends of the Earth, Roberts says that attitudes to
nuclear power boil down to ‘whether an individual believes it is right or
wrong for future generations to be left with our waste’. Gittus describes
most fears about waste as ‘irrational’. The industry claims that there is
a gulf between popular sentiment and reality. ‘People believe it’s piled
up somewhere and we don’t know what to do with it. But Finland has a repository,
and so does Sweden.’ So could Britain, if it had the will, says British
Nuclear Fuels, the state-owned nuclear company that reprocesses and stores
nuclear waste at Sellafield in Cumbria.

In any case, the quantities in question are tiny; a power station produces
less than 100 cubic metres of radioactive waste each year. This is barely
enough to fill a double-decker bus and most of it, according to Gittus,
is less radioactive than a Brazil nut. More than 95 per cent is low-level
waste, which can be stored with little special containment. Ah, say the
opponents, but nuclear waste is qualitatively different to other types of
industrial waste. Quite so, say the supporters: radioactivity decays over
time, but cadmium or mercury stays toxic forever.

Storing up trouble

This argument has a certain elegance, but it is irrelevant. As Roberts
suggests, public opinion is never going to accept nuclear waste as anything
other than a terrible responsibility for future generations. The only defence
is that the damage has already been done. The vast bulk of Britain’s radioactive
waste was created by the rush to develop nuclear weapons and nuclear-powered
submarines. Much of it will have to be guarded indefinitely. A few truckloads
of waste from a handful of new PWRs will make no difference. Nuclear Electric
says that Sizewell B will produce one-eighth the amount of radioactive waste
as an old magnox plant, per unit of electricity generated. Decommissioning
the plant will create only one-tenth the waste of taking apart a gas-cooled
reactor. For the government, however, the most significant disadvantage
of nuclear energy is cost.

Nuclear plants share with renewable plants the oddity that most of their
costs come upfront, with fuel only a small proportion of their total bill
(in a wind-turbine or tidal barrage, of course, fuel is free). The cost
of electricity thus depends on the cost of raising capital to build the
plant. Britain, with interest rates historically much higher than, say Japan,
finds nuclear electricity more expensive than coal or gas. But today, Britain’s
fossil fuel plants get an environmental free ride – they do not have to
compensate for polluting the air with acids, or emitting carbon dioxide.
If coal-fired plants were compelled to fit devices to remove emissions of
carbon dioxide, the advantage might swing back to nuclear plants; equipment
to remove sulphur emissions, for instance, adds about 20 per cent to the
cost of a unit of electricity.

A final argument against nuclear energy is the one of irrevocability.
Once embarked on the nuclear road, there seems to be no turning back. But,
like it or not, we live in a nuclear age. Although nuclear power never grew
as quickly as was once hoped, it generates about 17 per cent of the world’s
electricity. To use the phrase current in early debates on nuclear proliferation,
the genie is out of the bottle.

In Europe, Britain lags far behind France, which generates nearly three
quarters of its electricity from state-run nuclear plants. It is most unlikely
to change direction now. In 1991, Germany, Finland, Spain, Switzerland,
Sweden and Belgium all generated a larger percentage of electricity than
Britain did from nuclear power. Sweden, which in 1980 became the first industrialised
country to take a conscious decision to abandon nuclear power, has still
not closed a single power station.

Safer designs

In the US, despite the long hiatus following the accident at Three Mile
Island in 1979, nuclear power is still growing. Around 50 new reactors were
commissioned in the 1980s. Although no new plant has been ordered since
1974 without subsequently being cancelled, the Atomic Industrial Forum in
the US says new designs of reactor will revive the industry. One is the
so-called ‘intrinsically safe’ reactor, being developed with funding from
the US Department of Energy.

As for the former Eastern bloc, Ukraine generates 25 per cent of its
electricity from nuclear plants; tiny Lithuania more than half. The snag,
of course, is that these plants are rickety examples of the RBMK, of Chernobyl
notoriety. Early talk of shutting the reactors down on safety grounds has
faded; the cash is not available for replacements.

But the place where interest in nuclear energy is growing most dramatically
is East Asia. Booming economies mean growing demand for energy. South Korea’s
consumption of oil jumped by 21 per cent last year; China’s by nearly 9
per cent. Rising expectations of consumers mean public support for nuclear
power, even in countries that tolerate dissidence.

The model is Japan. Today, Japan’s 43 nuclear power stations generate
about one third of the country’s electricity. The powerful Ministry of International
Trade and Industry (MITI), which both promotes and regulates nuclear energy,
talks of building 20 new plants by 2010. Japan remains the only country
committed to the old dream of ‘closing the nuclear fuel cycle’, a goal that
will allow it to run its nuclear industry on its own, without any foreign
assistance to supply fuel or to reprocess and store waste.

Japan’s nuclear engineers regard Britain’s indecision with genuine bewilderment.
In 1959, when the Japan Atomic Power Company ordered the country’s first
nuclear power reactor, it looked to Britain and became one of the only two
overseas customers for a magnox design. (The other was Italy.) Japan’s magnox,
named Tokai-1, went critical in 1965 and began operating the following year.
It is still running. Japan’s nuclear destiny remains closely linked with
Britain’s, through the contracts to reprocess fuel at Sellafield, but Japan
no longer imports British technology. Instead, its private generating companies,
under the guidance of MITI, developed two families of reactors based originally
on American PWR and boiling-water reactors.

These companies are favourites to win the business of supplying their
Asian neighbours. Several of the ‘tiger’ economies have already embarked
on the nuclear road. Taiwan relies on nuclear power for one third of its
electricity. For the past two years, it has been considering buying a fourth
twin-reactor at Yenliao, on the north-east coast. The government, anxious
to be seen as a responsible member of the global economy, has promised to
put the plant out to open tender under GATT rules. Among the companies invited
to bid are Nuclear Electric and its US partner Westing-house, who want to
sell a twin PWR similar to Sizewell C. However the island has specified
that it will not buy a design that has not been licensed in the supplier’s
home country: so Nuclear Electric will be unable to bid while a moratorium
on the building, and thus licensing, of new plants exists in Britain. One
of the original reasons for switching to PWRs from early British designs
of gas-cooled reactors was that the new plants would be saleable overseas.
Nuclear Electric claims that Sizewell C will meet the world’s most stringent
licensing criteria.

Meanwhile, South Korea has nine reactors and is building nine more.
China is building its fourth power plant. Indonesia, the world’s fourth
largest country with a colossal potential demand for electricity, is among
the many others in the region with plans to develop nuclear power.

It is easy to forget that Britain once led the world in nuclear engineering.
On 17 October 1956, the Queen opened the Calder Hall reactor in Cumbria.
The first issue of a new weekly magazine, ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ, commented that
the problems of peaceful nuclear energy had been overcome. There was every
reason to suppose that Britain would supply nuclear reactors as it did in
other high-technology industries.

Loss leader

Despite the eclipse of other world leads, such as in computer hardware,
nuclear engineering has survived, nurtured by vast amounts of public money.
If Britain is to get anything back for this investment, says the BNIF, the
government’s Nuclear Review needs to give solid backing to a modest PWR
programme, with loan guarantees if necessary. Peter Rost, a former Conservative
MP who chairs the Major Energy Users’ Council, which represents large industrial
buyers of electricity, sees no conflict between nuclear power and a privately
run, environmentally sound, energy policy. ‘The review, I believe, should
focus on how nuclear power should be made competitive and privatised. If
that means doing some creative accounting, it wouldn’t be the first time.
But a wider review could work to nuclear’s advantage.’ Two promising ideas
for the development of a mix of environmentally friendly technologies, especially
those that conserve energy, may be tidal turbines, which tap a more predictable
resource than wind and waves, and combined heat and power systems, which
pipe waste heat from power stations into useful places rather than send
it up chimneys.

The government’s Coal Review estimated that demand for electricity will
grow over the next five years by between 1 and 2 per cent a year. But if
we are to take seriously the question of carbon dioxide emissions while
maintaining our Western standard of living, we must put in place electricity
generators that do not burn fossil fuels before the present generation of
nuclear plants reach the end of their lives. Nuclear power may not be an
ideal solution; reactors are not nice places and living with them forces
us to consider issues that we would rather ignore.

But having made most of the mistakes of nuclear energy it would be foolhardy
not to reap the benefits. Rost says it is important to keep options open.
‘It is unreasonable to say that just because nuclear power has failed us
economically, that’s the end of the story, because circumstances change
and can easily change again. We’re eventually going to have to price energy
according to its full environmental cost. When that happens, the comparative
economics of nuclear and renwables will come into line with those of fossil
fuel. So a wider review could work to nuclear’s advantage.’

The most likely alternative is not a return to some bicycle-powered
Arcadia, but another quarter century of fudge and bungle until the price
of gas soars. Then Britain would buy PWRs anyway, with Mitsubishi or Hitachi
written on the side. And, we’d have to sell an awful lot of plastic Beefeaters
to pay that bill.

Michael Cross is a freelance journalist.