Reacting to this morning's launch of a new energy review, Greenpeace executive director Stephen Tindale said:
"It's now clear that Ministers are asking the wrong questions. Instead of asking how Britain can make its energy system more efficient, this review is only looking at what kind of fuel we use to generate electricity.
"The UK has an electricity grid designed seventy years ago that wastes most of the fuel we put into it. What we need is an energy revolution, a grid that lets renewable schemes and energy efficiency measures meet their full potential."Instead the Government has launched a spin operation for nuclear power, a form of electricity generation that is the most expensive way to boil water ever devised."
Analysis by energy policy experts at America's Rocky Mountains Institute shows that energy conservation strategies are far more effective in reducing carbon dioxide emissions than constructing power stations of any type. They point out that nuclear power only produces electricity and can only possibly displace electricity plants, not the CO2 emissions which come from transport and domestic and industrial heat. They also looked at the costs of nuclear versus improved energy efficiency and found that every dollar invested in energy efficiency displaces 6.8 times more carbon than the same investment in nuclear power.
"To the extent investments in nuclear power divert funds away from efficiency," the study concludes, "the pursuit of a nuclear response to greenhouse warming would effectively exacerbate the problem."[1]
In 2003, at the time of the launch of the Energy White Paper, then DTI chief Patricia Hewitt said:
- "If we achieve a step change in both energy efficiency and renewables we will be able beyond 2020 to move to 2050 without the need for a generation of nuclear power stations."[2]
- "Energy efficiency is by far the cheapest and simplest way of meeting all our policy goals in this area."[3]
- "It would have been foolish to announce... that we would embark on a new generation of nuclear power stations because that would have guaranteed that we would not make the necessary investment in both energy efficiency and renewables. That is why we are not going to build a new generation of nuclear power stations now."[4]
Stephen Tindale added:
"The UK grid allows for a huge loss of energy - enough to heat all the buildings and all the water in the UK - because the large power stations far from our cities that make our electricity discard an enormous amount of heat through chimneys, while more power is lost transporting the energy long distances through power lines. A new generation of nuclear power stations would cement this system in place, preventing the development of a decentralised grid and stifling renewable energy generation."
Nuclear power plants are also vulnerable to terrorist attack. This month Greenpeace launched a film shot by special effects experts that shows a hijacked plane flying into Sizewell nuclear power plant (see www.greenpeace.org.uk).
Further information
Contact Greenpeace on 0207 865 8255.
Notes
- 'Taking The Wind Out Of Nuclear Power' - 19 January 2006, Pacific Ecologist, issue 11; pp 51 - 57
- 'Five years for green power to prove its worth: Ministers throw down gauntlet on alternative to nuclear comeback', by David Gow, Tuesday February 25, 2003; The Guardian
- Hansard; 20 March 2003 : Column 1071
- Hansard; 24 February 2003 : Column 32
