Has Tony Blair Forgotten That it Was His Labour Government That Blocked Nuclear Power?

BEN PILE

From time-to-time, various architects of the mess we are in come to some kind of nuclear power epiphany. This diversion via some Atomic Road to Damascus occurs because the road to the Net Zero Utopia turns out to be much longer, much more winding, and far more littered with obstacles than green lobbyists and wonks had imagined. Indeed, as a number of greens including George Monbiot and Mark Lynas discovered way back in the 2000s, it is the green movement itself that has been the greatest barrier to zero-carbon power. To an observer and critic of green ideology, the sight of eco-comrades realising that they are each the fetter that prevents the realisation of the others’ dreams ought to be amusing. But this green-on-green violence affects us all, and no destination that they choose, including nuclear power, will take us to a better place.

The latest bunch to join this denomination of eco-protestants hail from no less a place than the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI). In a report published this week, authors described as “the experts” argue either that there should be a nuclear renaissance or that it is already happening – it’s not clear which.

Other people’s epiphanies are extremely dull. That is because in most cases they lack anything resembling reflection on the epiphany itself that could be shared, and instead merely state a new position. The TBI’s argument for a nuclear renaissance is no exception. It yields no examination of the role of the eponymous institute’s chief while in office. This is a failure, because whereas the report dwells on historic nuclear accidents and their influencing of policy debates, it sheds no light on how those policy debates influenced decisions at the former PM’s then address. The ‘Eureka!‘ moment does not require it to be a mea culpa, but green conversions from anti- to pro-nuclear ought at a minimum to be more than a doubling down on the ideology that informed their earlier stance.

Put simply, many green U-turns on nuclear power, though they recognise the self-defeating effect of the green movement, merely reformulate environmentalism’s superficial risk analysis. The argument made by newly pro-nuclear greens is merely that their erstwhile comrades have put ideology before the facts. Nuclear is safe, or at any rate ‘safer than climate change’, they argue to their new opponents’ counterclaims that they are ‘Chernobyl death deniers’. Now, everyone claims to have read ‘The Science’, everyone is called a denier, and everyone claims to have put the facts before ideology, unlike the others.

“This is a pivotal moment in the fight against climate change,” concludes the report, adding: “Accelerated action is needed in every country across the world, with more rapid deployment of all types of clean technologies and new solutions to deliver clean power for all.”

The problem with this is that it is not an argument for energy. It has lost sight of the most important thing: what is energy for? On the TBI’s view, energy policy is just a way of stopping climate change, not the means by which an irreplaceable commodity can be sustained, allowing society to prosper – energy being the means to almost all the ends that people can imagine for themselves. It is those green ideologues who have recently surrounded governments who have invented illiberal terms such as ‘unnecessary journey’, and who reinvented the concept of ‘efficiency’ to mean governments stepping in to prevent journeys using coercive means.

That may sound like an obscure objection. But a broad, long and deep view of the history of green ideas is required to understand the degenerative condition of our Government. In 1978, in an article called ‘An Ecologist’s Perspective on Nuclear Power’ in a Federation of American Scientists’ Public Issue Report, Paul Ehrlich wrote:

In fact, giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun. With cheap, abundant energy, the attempt clearly would be made to pave, develop, industrialise, and exploit every last bit of the planet — a trend that would inevitably lead to a collapse of the life-support systems upon which civilisation depends.

This was the era of the “Nuclear Power, No Thanks” emoji sticker, found on practically every Citroen 2CV in Europe. And it established, long before climate change and the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents, a deep hostility to abundance.

Ehrlich was of course wrong. Wrong about everything. And wrong about energy in particular. Abundant and cheap energy reduces humanity’s footprint: coal saved the forests and oil saved the whales. Abundant and affordable energy in turn increases other available resources and maximises their efficient usage, especially in respect to capital and labour, reducing the extensiveness of agriculture, for example, by increasing its intensity, even ultimately replacing the sun as the source of agriculture’s energy in some circumstances. Hence, the footprint of the world’s agriculture has diminished since the 1990s, despite a growing population. Since the 1960s, the area of land required to produce a given quantity of crops has fallen by two thirds. The per capita requirement of land has fallen dramatically over the era of industrialisation. Ehrlich, who predicted that mass famines lay ahead, has issued no apologies for any of his errors.

Perceptions are opposite to the reality. Thanks to material abundance, we have more space. And we give much more space to ‘nature’, for better or worse. But the idea that the human footprint is exceeding its boundaries into ‘nature’ is now the dominant view, thanks to the likes of Ehrlich. The imperative of protecting ‘nature’ has risen up the global and national political agenda, despite the facts, urged on by stories of imminent doom. And that imperative has always emphasised green austerity – ascetism – as the only viable solution.

So how does this affect a reading of the TBI’s report?

Ehrlich’s errors, it should be noted, have the awkward unintended consequence (for greens) of having led to an increase in CO2 emissions. “The price of opposition” to nuclear power, says the report, is “what could have happened if the world had not turned away from nuclear power”. If nuclear power had continued its growth seen in the 1960s and 1970s, 29 billion metric tons of CO2 emissions would have been avoided since 1991, the report claims.

Perhaps, then, environmentalism isn’t really about the environment. Perhaps the virtue of ‘protecting the environment’ from the perspective of policymakers is that it is an emotionally-resonant cause, which licences politicians’ authoritarian impulses. Moreover, by making a virtue out of austerity, the production of resources becomes a zero-sum game that can be quickly dominated by the currently wealthy, who will be protected from new players by environmental regulations. Modern day ‘feudal’ interests resent nothing more than new money being mobilised by innovations. We only need to look at Ehrlich’s sponsors to see that there was indeed a desire to slam the door shut in the rest of the world’s face, just as it was emerging from poverty and hunger and the world stood on the brink of abundance.

The report’s finding of 29 billion metric tons may sound like a lot. But it’s not a strong argument for nuclear power. Global CO2 emissions reached 37.79 billion metric tons in 2023. Nuclear power would have only avoided the CO2 of just one year – 2006. This speaks to the lack of genuine ambition characterising Blair era ideologies and policymaking.

Many people were making pro-nuclear arguments in the 2000s. But the Blair and Brown Governments merely vacillated on the issue. As James Woudhuysen and Joe Kaplinsky – authors of a definitive book on the necessity of energy innovation, Energise! – argued in 2009, the Government’s “arguments for nuclear – that it contributes to energy security, enhances generation diversity, is proven technology, etc. – are subordinate to ‘the urgent need to decarbonise the economy’”. “In well over 500 pages of National Policy Statements,” they pointed out, “Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has spent more than 300 trying to streamline the planning of new nuclear reactors.” But none came.

The idea that the Labour Government was ‘pro-nuclear’ was a myth, argued Woudhuysen and Kaplinsky in an earlier piece. By then in power for 12 years, no nuclear plants had been commissioned. “Green posturing and very modest green investment come way before genuine support for new nuclear power.” The Government’s preoccupuation with “safety, risk, physical security, costs, waste and decommissioning” mean that “nuclear power cannot win”. “Only if society’s need for more energy is put in the foreground can nuclear power’s supporters expect to win the arguments for it.”

The new TBI report shows that nothing has changed since Woudhuysen and Kaplinsky’s observations. There are no reports from Government or Government-aligned, nor even opposition-aligned think tanks, headed by ex-PMs and ex-Ministers, that are capable of shedding any light on what has held Britain back, much less challenging the green ideological precepts driving our regression. Climate change is the only idea that animates any action whatsoever. And that action is almost entirely expensive and regressive.

I am for nuclear power. But we face far deeper problems than ones that can be solved by technologies. We know how to produce energy. Much of that knowledge was produced in the U.K. and mastered here decades ago. We know how to exploit the resources that exist in great abundance beneath our feet. Whatever the technical virtues of nuclear power, the problems besetting nuclear energy’s progress in the U.K. are not going to be resolved in any near- to mid-term scenario. Meanwhile, the influence of green ideology will continue to destabilise and restrict existing supply and increase costs.

Many who are cheering on this new, YIMBY-ish pro-nuclear tendency are naïve to the fact that this superficial transformation is the opposite of what it appears to be. It is not a counter to green ideology and the desire for ecological austerity. It is merely being pitched as a solution to the problem of the lights going off, regardless of cost. And it is being sought as a way to sustain the U.K.’s international prestige (in their own eyes) as a “global leader” in the “race to Net Zero”. It is not an argument for abundance at affordable prices or for the freedoms that energy can create.

“The history of nuclear power provides a stark example of how the politics around key solutions to progress can become warped, ultimately resulting in less good outcomes,” states the report’s summary. Well, that was obvious to anyone watching as far back as the 1990s. Yet the £145 million year TBI has only just realised, or only just got round to telling us. Moreover, if the “politics around key solutions to progress” are to be investigated, it is the role of green ideology itself that needs to be exposed, not concerns about the safety of nuclear power in isolation. It’s nearly 30 years since Blair created these problems – and many more besides – by committing to renewable energy. The 2000 Energy Act, for example, requires energy retailers to provide an increasing supply of power from renewables, which are defined as “sources of energy other than fossil fuel or nuclear fuel”. In other words, legislation drafted less than three years into Blair’s first term in office was intended to drive away nuclear energy just as much as it was intended to destroy coal power.

It worked. A quarter of a century later, the effects are obvious. Since the Energy Act, 11 nuclear power stations with a combined capacity of 6.6 GW have shut down. Over the next three years, a further four stations with a capacity of 5.3GW will shut down, leaving just one plant, Sizewell B, operating until Hinkley Point C, commissioned in 2014 and whose opening has been delayed from 2023 to 2030, is operational. Sizewell B will be closed in 2035. And if the development of Hinkley Point C is instructive, even if a fleet of new nuclear plants is commissioned today, they will not come online until the 2040s. Many are proposing that Small Modular Reactors may be the solution. But they face the same regulatory hurdles that will have soon shut down 12 GW of nuclear capacity. And that regulatory process will face an even ‘greener’ Parliament, dominated by Labour MPs, nearly all of whom have outsourced their thinking to the Green Blob.

The only thing to have been more successfully completely demolished by Blair than British nuclear power was Iraq. To witness his pro-nuclear epiphany – produced on his behalf by ignorant wonks – as though he played no part in the destruction of a technology pioneered by Brits is too much humbug to describe. The world’s first commercial nuclear power station was built in Calder Hall in Sellafield in 1956 – when we really could claim to have led the world to something that is not destructive, even if the plant produced plutonium for nuclear weapons. It lasted until 2003, when Blair’s interpretation of Ehrlich’s vision was in full swing.


This article (Has Tony Blair Forgotten That it Was His Labour Government That Blocked Nuclear Power?) was created and published by The Daily Sceptic and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Ben Pile

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