Labour are plain wrong on nuclear power - Kevin Lang

6.53.00pm GMT Wed 26th Mar 2008

Liberal Democrat candidate for Edinburgh North & Leith Kevin Lang has hit out at the Labour Government for their decision to push ahead with a huge expansion in nuclear power in the UK.

The Labour Secretary of State for Business today said the UK should go beyond simply replacing its 23 reactors and called on the UK to become "a new nuclear renaissance across Europe".

Kevin Lang said, "Nuclear power is an expensive, ineffective and insecure way of providing energy to the UK's homes and businesses. Worst of all, no answer has yet been provided by the Government or anyone else on how to deal with the most dangerous forms of waste produced from nuclear reactors.

"Rather than spending millions of pounds of taxpayers' money on nuclear power, the government should be focusing more on energy efficiency and renewable power. Here in Scotland, we have the opportunity to become the renewable powerhouse of Europe with 100% of our electricity generated from green renewable power by 2050 but only if the investment is put in.

"Edinburgh North & Leith's Labour MP may say he is against nuclear but on this issue, he is clearly putting his own career before the interests of his constituents by being a loyal member of a Labour Government that has chosen to press ahead with a massive increase in nuclear power generation in the UK."

WHY NUCLEAR IS NOT THE ANSWER

Cost and Carbon - nuclear power is far more costly than any numbers you may have seen from the DTI, and it cannot exist without large and often hidden central government subsidy. If we ignored the hidden subsidies, nuclear's position might look better if carbon were priced higher. But better carbon pricing would equally improve the economics of nuclear power's truly renewable rivals. Nuclear power's position relative to them would not change; it is just that fossil fuel based generation would become much more expensive. What is more, the cost of these new rival technologies will fall rapidly as they are researched and deployed, whereas nuclear is an old technology whose costs are unlikely to fall.

Climate Change - investment in new nuclear build would channel funds away from accelerating the development of renewable technologies to give Britain a lead in their design and manufacture, and on increasing the efficiency of the energy we do use. It is "either/or" and not "both", as has been seen repeatedly in the past with government subsidy into nuclear research dwarfing all other science and engineering support put together.

Timing - at the moment it would take 17 years to build a new nuclear power plant. Even if the government changes the planning and safety rules, it will still take at least 12 years. It is also impossible to build a new nuclear fleet all at once. New power stations would appear slowly over an extended period; by then the ones currently in use will already have been largely decommissioned, so there will still be an 'energy gap' that needs filling from alternative sources when the current nuclear stations are decommissioned, whatever we do.

Waste - contrary to what the government says, the problem of waste has not been solved. The CoRWM committee said that, although deep storage was the best solution available for existing waste, it would take many years to find a site acceptable to the public and they were not endorsing making new waste from new power stations. It is also untrue, as Tony Blair claims, that modern nuclear power stations produce less waste. They might produce less low-level waste, but they produce much more high-level waste, the most dangerous kind.

Security - nuclear locks us into a centralised electricity distribution system for another 40 years, reducing the appetite for distributed and micro-generation and increasing exposure of the network to terrorist threat. Unified designs also mean that if one reactor in the fleet has a problem, they all need to be switched off until a solution is found, meaning that a large amount of backup capacity is required.

Proliferation - Although the UK cannot solve climate change on its own, we should aim to find a solution that could work as a model for other countries. Given that civil and military uses of nuclear are closely linked, putting pressure on foreign powers to limit their own nuclear programmes and halt nuclear weapons proliferation becomes much easier when we have demonstrated that civil nuclear power is not needed in the UK.