Neil Craig Goes Nuclear

In a letter to The Scotsman:

"Professor Stephen Salter (Letters, 25 October) accuses me of being "dishonest" in saying that whereas the cost of our windmill power is being cut from 9p to 8p per kwh the French nuclear equivalent is 1.3p and requests that I inform him where the figure came from. I was responding to a previous article in The Scotsman about a proposed reduction in wholesale windmill prices to the grid and gave the equivalent French price, to the grid.

Professor Salter accuses me (letter 25th Oct) of being "dishonest" in saying that whereas our windmill power is being reduced from 9 to 8p per kwh the French equivalent is 1.3p & requests that I inform him where the figure came from. I was responding to a previous article in the Scotsman about a proposed reduction in wholesale windmill prices to the grid & gave the equivalent French price, to the grid. This came from the World Nuclear Organisation whose website lists the production cost of French nuclear as being 2.54 cents which does, or at least used to, correlate to slightly under 1.3p. Perhaps Professor Salter may wish to acknowledge his error in confusing retail prices with wholesale

Keeping the lights on is arguably the most important issue in British politics today. However bad the credit crunch may be it does not compare with what will happen when they go out. Nor is the fact that 24,000 pensioners have been dying, quite unnecessarily, every year from the effects of fuel poverty & that this is expected to nearly double this winter, an unimportant statistic.

As the previous LibDem leader said on TV "nuclear is the easy solution" going on to explain that it thus must be prevented from working otherwise the public could not be frightened into subsidising windmills. Professor Salter can confirm this since he was Nicol's co-speaker at the time.

Reactors can be built in 4 years, excluding paperwork & if we do not have them by 2015, when new EU emission controls will close so much conventional power, we will have massive blackouts."

And in a letter to what some of us still think of as The Glasgow Herald:

"Nick Dekker produces a well-argued but extremely optimistic letter (October 27) about our electricity supply.

Scotland may be using "only" five gigawatts of power, as he says, but we are also supplying another one to the Irish and English grids, and I doubt if either would let us break long-term contracts. Most of the 2.3GW from Peterhead is oil-fired and we simply cannot afford to keep it going. In any case, lack of transmission capacity would severely limit its ability to help us in the central belt. Wind farms only produce, on average, about 26% of their rated capacity, often less (hence the term average) and under the strictures of Murphy's Law would be unavailable in a mid-winter snowstorm when we needed it.

Most of the rest of his 6.5GW theoretical wind farm capacity is even more theoretical because it has not been built. Indeed, we have previously had the word of Scottish Renewables, hardly opponents of the concept, that wind farms cannot provide part of base load.

Pump storage is only useful if you have had 60% more spare capacity in the first place to pump it up. Hydro is valuable but its rated capacity is misleading, since any loch emptying water at maximum capacity will very quickly empty.

Ignoring these & the oil generator at Peterhead gives us a top capacity of just over 6GW for a peak demand, including export of 6GW.

Absolutely no problem whatsoever, then - so long as the ageing reactors at Hunterston and Torness never need repair, or if Longannet goes offline by accident, as it has previously, or, indeed, that previous peak demand is not exceeded in a cold winter.

And this takes no account of the fact that electricity usage goes up with economic growth - though I grant it looks like we may be spared economic success.

And it takes no account for the fact that all high-emission coal stations are to close in 2015, leaving us with blackouts, even without a growing economy.

It takes four years to build a new nuclear reactor, though even in England the government intends to first spend five years doing paperwork. We know that French nuclear designs can produce as much electricity as we want at 1.3p per kWh, because they have been doing so for decades. Our politicians, who know all this perfectly well, have been grossly irresponsible for decades.

We have recently seen politicians of all parties claim to be opposed to fuel poverty and the 24,000 pensioner deaths that it has caused each winter, even without blackouts or this year's prices. It is not possible for any of them to do that honestly while opposing the only practical way out of this unnecessary catastrophe."

Together with coal, nuclear power offers to secure high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs for the working class, and independence from Arab oil and Russian gas. Among many other good things, this would contribute significantly to reversing Thatcher's destruction of the economic base of paternal authority, initially in working-class families and communities, but then very rapidly throughout society as a whole.

Only public ownership can deliver what is necessary on the scale that is necessary. And public ownership is, of course, British ownership.

How could any conservative object to any of this?