Martin Ince conducts a thought experiment

Vanessa Spedding is right to point out (SPA September 2006) that the UK’s energy policy is at a fork in the road.

She might have added that most other countries in the developed world are similarly located, although not all have the added distraction of declining oil production as a factor in their energy equation.

Although I am delighted that a national debate seems to be taking place on this pressing topic, one disappointing aspect so far has been the contribution of the scientific community, and nowhere more so than in their thoughts on the possible revival of nuclear power. Scientists have tended to say that we have to have nuclear because they cannot imagine anything else. Maybe this just means that they are the wrong people to ask.

For a nuclear power station to get built, a commercial company will have to decide that it is the best use of its capital, in the teeth of evidence that many other energy investments pay back more, and faster. A community (probably near Sellafield) will have to accept this new neighbour. And, with time for planning consent and construction, perhaps 15 years will have to evaporate before a light bulb is lit or a kettle is boiled.

These are serious objections, but what about another one, perhaps nearer to SPA readers’ hearts? We all think that the UK has too few engineers and scientists. But reviving nuclear power will need thousands of them. The last time it was at its height, in the 1960s, the UK nuclear industry employed over 20,000 of these scarce creatures.
 
New thinking

Now try a thought experiment. Imagine that these people had not been asked to think up a new way to boil water, which is all nuclear power really is. Imagine that they had been asked to make Britain as energy-efficient as possible. They could have rethought buildings, machines, cars, aircraft, TVs, gas stoves; and of course the industrial processes used to make them and the materials they were made from. Can anyone doubt that this would have saved far more energy than nuclear power stations have generated?

Although history never repeats itself, whatever the nuclear industry might hope, there is a chance that we are about to repeat this mistake. Nuclear power ties us in to getting electricity from a few big power stations feeding a national grid, a 20th century idea that may have run its course. It risks distracting attention from novel ideas such as nanotechnology-powered devices that can suck power out of small differences in ambient temperature and pressure.

Because British electricity is no longer supplied by the state, no government can announce that there will be new atomic power stations. But they can encourage genuine innovation – something else all SPA readers support – by announcing that there will not be any.

Martin Ince is Contributing Editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement