Shiny new Chernobyls posted by Meaders

You knew it was coming:

Prime Minister Tony Blair is set to give his strongest signal yet that he backs the building of a new generation of nuclear power stations in the UK...

BBC political editor Nick Robinson said ministers appeared to be considering changes to the planning process to overcome local resistance to new power stations.

No 10 says Mr Blair will say he has seen a "first cut" of the government-commissioned energy review, which is due by the end of July...

The prime minister is due to say that if current policy remains unchanged there will be a "dramatic gap" on targets to reduce CO2 emissions by 2025 forcing Britain to become heavily dependent on gas.

That old chestnut: it beggars belief that an industry with as dismal an environmental record as nuclear power's should be rebranding itself as a squeaky-clean green crusader - though appointing the ludicrous Bernard Ingham as your Captain Planet hardly suggests they're taking the effort too seriously. Nor should we pretend this stuff is cheap.

If Blair is claiming that nuclear is any solution to Britain's greenhouse gas emissions, he is peddling a myth:

A complete life-cycle analysis shows that generating electricity from nuclear power emits 20-40% of the carbon dioxide per kiloWatt hour ( kWh) of a gas-fired system when the whole system is taken into account (see Nuclear Power: the Energy Balance by Jan-Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith).

The nuclear process chain also emits other greenhouse gases besides carbon dioxide with far stronger global-warming potential such as chloro- and fluorohydrocarbons and probably SF6. These emissions are difficult to quantify from the open literature, but the total emission of carbon dioxide equivalents by a nuclear system will be significantly more than 20-40% of a gas-fired system with the same energy output.

...all of which means, far from delivering the magic solution to climate change, nuclear power is barely worth the immense effort:

Research by the SDC suggests that even if the UK's existing nuclear capacity was doubled, it would only provide an 8% cut on CO2 emissions by 2035 (and nothing before 2010).

There is no silver bullet, and it is disturbing that this crass, myopic government is starting to peddle the myth that there is. After the failures of their own energy policies - inherited and all but unchanged, needless to say, from the Tories - failures revealed once more this week, they're thrashing around for a clean quick-fix. That they should end up with the dirtiest, most expensive "quick-fix" imaginable is in character. What we need to tackle carbon emissions is planning: an integrated plan to deal with emissions from transport, housing, food consumption, and the rest. We need a serious research commitment to renewable and genuinely zero-emission fuels. What we do not need is New Labour's wilful short-termism.

Update: The text of Blair's speech to the CBI is now available:

The facts are stark. By 2025, if current policy is unchanged there will be a dramatic gap on our targets to reduce CO2 emissions, we will become heavily dependent on gas and at the same time move from being 80% to 90% self-reliant in gas to 80% to 90% dependent on foreign imports, mostly from the Middle East, and Africa and Russia.

Where, exactly, does the Prime Minister think uranium comes from? Organic farms in Wiltshire?

It'll come as no great surprise, either, to find that the figures making the economic case for nukes are apparently being busily rigged.