Britain Needs To Talk About Nuclear Energy

Extreme weather over the weekend in the United Kingdom will have led more people than usual to wonder about climate change and its impact on their daily lives. Ahead of COP26, the 26th UN Climate Change Conference hosted by the U.K. in November, all the Paris signatories of COP21 in 2016 must submit revised climate plans, with their ambitions. Britain’s legally binding target to bring all greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 allows time. Nuclear energy has been acknowledged as playing an important role, but its scope remains unclear. History suggests that scant public knowledge of a subject can lead to polarised opinion. Nuclear power and what it now offers needs to be talked about more in the context of COP26.

“Nuclear energy has an important role to play in helping us achieve this target and will be a key part of our future net-zero energy mix”, the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has affirmed. But the state of the nuclear programme has repeatedly raised questions about the U.K.’s ability to reach its net zero goal. A report just out by the Centre for Policy Studies, (CPS) a Conservative think-tank, draws attention to the dangers of intermittency from wind and solar energy alone, despite record levels of renewable energy generation in 2020.

Bridging the gap : the case for new nuclear investment , the CPS report, offers analysis suggesting that wind and solar provided less than 20% of daily electricity demand on 82 separate occasions in 2020. The construction of at least one additional plant would, it says, “provide a significant boost to Britain’s energy security while seven of the UK’s eight nuclear power stations are decommissioned by 2030. It would complement Britain’s booming renewables portfolio and help to manage periods of variability.”

The CPS report is funded by France’s EDF Energy, which operates all the U.K’s nuclear power stations. EDF is building the new nuclear power plant at Hinkley point, and planning one at Sizewell. Back in France EDF has faced repeated disruption amid strikes by workers protesting against French plans for nuclear reform. In the U.K. while news is awaited on a plant at Sizewell with the promise of 25,000 jobs to go with it, environmental activists continue to protest.

Those in the U.K. who are reluctant to consider any positives from nuclear power may dismiss the report on the basis of EDF’s funding. But it would be smarter to look at the bigger and more complicated picture. The report highlights an important need to act to prevent shortfalls in energy provision.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) calls the U.K. “a global leader in decarbonisation", stating that by 2030 wind and solar power are expected to reach above 50% of power provision, more than any other member country. But it says that solutions for flexible electricity markets and technologies need to be scaled up. Coal and nuclear power capacity is going to retire and “new nuclear faces a weak outlook”, with the contribution of natural gas to meet peak demand likely to increase, it says. Gas remained the biggest source of energy generation in the U.K. last year, at 34.5%.

Nuclear energy was (after wind power ranked second in energy provision) the third largest at 17.2%, according to the CPS report.

“The UK Clean Growth Strategy puts energy technology and innovation at the centre of its decarbonisation policy. The country’s offshore expertise is a strong basis for innovative technologies, such as carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) and also hydrogen, along with improving energy efficiency” says the IEA. Among its recommendations to the U.K. in 2019, it suggests it “further lead international energy RD&D collaboration and efforts to scale up energy technology innovation including nuclear power and CCUs.”

In December 2020 the U.K took an innovative leap when it embarked on building the world’s first nuclear fusion power station. The New Scientist wrote: “The plant is pitched as an important plank in efforts to hit the UK’s target of net zero emissions by 2050. But fusion faces big challenges to play that role. Reproducing the way the sun makes energy, by fusing hydrogen together to make helium, requires significant energy on Earth to heat and control the hydrogen with huge magnets.”

Nuclear fusion is also seen as the holy grail of clean energy, as this CNBC video explains.

In the U.K. we now have two small private companies - Tokamak Energy and First Light Fusion - that are confident of a breakthrough. As the Financial Times reported at the end of 2020, both companies have set an ambitious goal of delivering a working reactor ready for commercialisation by 2030, 10 years earlier than the UK Atomic Energy Authority in charge of the state-funded fusion programme.

Collaboration between public and private sectors has been in the spotlight since the Covid-19 pandemic first assaulted the world, and will stay in sharp focus as it fights to combat the climate crisis and re-establish the balance in the ecosystem. The Astra Zeneca “oxford vaccine” stands as a reminder of innovation in commercial partnership.

One can only hope that the pandemic will have made most people in the U.K. - and the rest of the world - better informed about science, research, vaccines, and issues of public health and welfare that affect us all., and have enhanced the appetite for learning. The U.K. government has changed its communication strategy during the pandemic to go direct to stakeholders as much possible with questions from ‘real people’ rather than just journalists at its daily coronavirus briefings in national lockdowns.

As COP26 comes closer, a similar approach is needed with a lot more information around the options for dealing with a climate emergency, and that includes more clarity on nuclear power. With six of the UK’s seven nuclear reactors due to go offline by 2030, and the remaining Sizewell B due to be decommissioned by 2035, these account for 20% of the country’s electricity.

Earlier this month Shearwater Energy, a UK energy firm, said it had plans for a hybrid plant of small nuclear reactors and a wind farm in north Wales. The BBC reported the firm saying that it could build the hybrid plant for “less than £8bn” and start generating carbon-neutral power by late 2027. The company has signed an understanding with US power firm NuScale for 12 small modular reactors (SMRs) after the US firm became the first company last August to win approval for its small reactors from U.S nuclear regulators.

There’s a lot happening very fast in the world at the moment and nuclear is a complex subject unlikely to be on the agenda for most members of the general public. But media coverage of climate change and the need for climate action has reached most, and become very real in the course of the last 12 months .The effects on air quality and the environment of multiple lockdowns are there for all to see, as is the virtue of protected and publicly accessible green spaces.

The U.K government has made it clear that it prizes innovation, and with ‘home schooling’ having become a daily reality over 2020 and into 2021, adults are re-learning even as they try to teach their children themselves. There are virtues to very simple BBC videos involving bags of rice on how SMRs work (see BBC link above as I dare not embed the video for copyright reasons). Briefings from the science and medical experts direct to the nation have probably done more for the agenda for diversity and gender equality and to boost interest in STEM careers than endless government drives - a large proportion of the familiar faces we have seen daily on our television screens have been female, and have served as excellent role models.

The time is ripe for more information to come from the government to the country as a whole, and not just on the stage at COP26 - and that’s also why we need to know more about the plan for nuclear energy.

Image credit: Mick Truyts (Antwerp ) on Unsplash