My Green New Deal and Finance for the Future colleague Colin Hines had this post on the Green Alliance blog this week. It is shared here with his permission:
The appalling events in the Ukraine, coupled with the recent chilling report from the IPCC suggesting the world is on the verge of being too late to cope with the climate and nature crisis, makes it crystal clear that our security, in its broadest sense, is threatened. At the same time, the spiralling cost of living crisis, the rapid erosion of social provision for our basic needs and the lack of secure, adequately paid jobs to tackle all these issues is becoming ever more apparent.
The unavoidable interplay between weaning ourselves off gas and oil, whether Russian or otherwise, and the need to tackle the climate crisis, has prompted politicians like UK business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng MP, to push for more renewable energy generation and energy efficiency to cut dependence on fossil fuels
What is now becoming increasingly apparent is that there will be massive political pressure for a solution to the cost of living crisis, as well as its damaging interaction with cuts to health, housing, education provision and other public services. If these crises in turn lead to a loss of consumer confidence that creates a recession, all these issues will be compounded.
There are ways to fund change at huge scale
Tackling these myriad threats to people's sense of security will require massive upfront expenditure. Luckily, the way the systemic shocks of the 2008 banking crisis and Covid were mitigated shows a way forward. On those occasions, the government, via the Bank of England, created new money on a vast scale using quantitative easing (QE): £895 billion was created between 2009 and 2021. What is needed now is a new massive ‘security QE' programme to tackle our social, environmental and defence shortfalls.
That, however, is not the only potential source of new funding to tackle the crises we face. Another huge source could be savings. The Office for National Statistics recently estimated that there are £1,933 billion of net savings in the UK, in addition to pension wealth of £6,445 billion. Together these represent 55 per cent of the UK's total wealth, including property ownership. Richard Murphy and I showed last year how this could be leveraged to raise the tens of billions of pounds needed to make all the UK's 30 million buildings energy efficient, and how that could be organised to create jobs in every constituency. And the potential for further social purposes for these savings clearly exists.
The steps being taken to cripple the Russian economy can provide another source of funds. Building on the new determination to sanction oligarchs, shell companies, tax havens and their facilitators, the lessons learnt could be adapted to identify major new sources of additional taxes. These could be used to help fund the social infrastructure and jobs required for a secure green economy.
This combination of funding sources is what I have referred to before as a QuEST: Quantitative Easing, Savings and Taxation, a concept developed with Richard Murphy, in consultation with other members of the Green New Deal group.
Clearly the war in Ukraine requires a response involving changes on a scale not seen since the aftermath of World War II. Such epoch making shifts in policy, underpinned by funding as described, could result in the achievement of crucial national and regional security goals. These would encompass adequate defence, tackling the climate and cost of living crises, and a massive increase in the provision of basic social needs. This could be organised to provide secure, adequately paid jobs and predominantly local business opportunities.
The nuclear threat must be removed
But even these tectonic political and social shifts need to be augmented by tackling the nuclear threat to humanity and the planet, rarely discussed until the events of this conflict bought them to global attention. The present nuclear status quo rests on a mixture of danger and delusion. Danger because today's de facto maintenance of minimum nuclear armed deterrence means keeping these weapons forever, with the certainty they will eventually be used either deliberately or in error.
What the Ukraine war has shown is that the rationality required at the heart of the aptly named concept of MAD (mutually assured destruction) does not hold with a leader like Vladimir Putin. His threat to use nuclear weapons has moved us from an era of nuclear deterrence to one of nuclear appeasement, as seen by the west's inability to adequately support the people of the Ukraine.
The other delusion lies in the idea that nation states can be persuaded and policed effectively so they do not use the knowledge of running nuclear power into the development of nuclear weapons. India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea, and now potentially Iran, show the colossal folly of such an approach.
Two steps are required to counter this. One involves the reduction, then eventual elimination of nuclear weapons, in a way that, at the same time, gives nuclear nations the confidence to do so. Jonathon Schell in his book The Abolition explains how to achieve this by what he terms ‘weaponless deterrence'. He proposes allowing nuclear states to keep the infrastructure to remake nuclear weapons should there be any verified threat of a new nation obtaining nuclear weapons. This approach could underpin global pressure to halt any aspiring nuclear nation, since such weapons are in the process of being negotiated away.
The second step would be a parallel programme to eliminate the twin threats from nuclear power of nuclear proliferation and possible widespread radioactive pollution, induced by the destruction of nuclear power stations during a war. Once seen as fanciful, the events in Ukraine saw the world wake up to headlines such as ‘Nuclear catastrophe 'narrowly' averted'. To help fund this transition, money at present earmarked for nuclear energy programmes should be diverted to help finance a comprehensive and predominantly decentralised, low carbon energy system, mostly employing renewables and energy efficiency.
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Obviously we should be investing more in renewables. And just as importantly insulation. But I think nuclear has to be part of the mix for some time to come.
As I understand it, the reason why France has so much nuclear electricity generation is precisely because they realised how exposed they were to the price of imported oil in the 1970s. Mostly of their plants opened in the 1970s and 1980s and will need replacing before too long, probably with a mix of nuclear and renewables. They haven’t open a new one since 2002.
The UK took a different path, and of course we had North Sea oil and gas. We haven’t opened a new nuclear plant since Sizewell B in 1995, but we have closed down 24 reactors and another 10 planned to close in the 2020s.
ITER is still more than a decade away from full operation, and we can’t wait another 20 years for fusion power.
And what do you do with the waste?
Reprocess, reuse, or transmute as much as you can. Store the rest as securely as possible.
Renewables are of course key, but even so, I can’t see the World being able to maintain the current level (let alone the forecasted desired increase) of energy consumption.
One of the key concepts behind the push for electric vehicles, is the notion of Vehicle-to-Grid to provide backup power from your car to the National Grid when needed.
So according to https://grid.iamkate.com/ at 0930 this morning, last month wind averaged 6.1GW, and last week it averaged 0.97GW.
So that is a shortfall of 5GW of wind over a week, which is 840GWh.
A car battery has, on average, 62.5kWh (https://ev-database.uk/cheatsheet/useable-battery-capacity-electric-car), so we would need 13.4 million car batteries to cover last week’s shortfall of wind (assuming my sums are correct). And that would be all those car batteries completely drained.
Doesn’t sound very plausible.
Alternatively we would need 5 times more of new wind farms – assuming that each of the new wind farms are as productive in the same wind conditions as the existing ones – which is unlikely since you would expect the current wind farms are already taking the best possible locations.
It gives us some idea of the scale of the issue. And last month the wind was just a 6th of the average electricity demand, and electricity is about a 5th? of our total energy requirements – most British homes and businesses use gas for heat, for example, most vehicles currently on the road use petrol or diesel, and most industrial processes that require heat use gas.
Something to ponder…
You ignore energy saving….
And that is the biggest issue of all without which we cannot go green
And this applies to gas and road fuel too, where change has to happen
Apart from the nuclear waste “problem” (not in my backyard please!) the other problems wrt nuclear are:
1. cost
2. time.
Cost, Flammeville 3 (france) was costed at €3.5bn @ start and has risen to €20bn. It does not look a good deal when compared to other options.
Time: Hinkley started the “shall we do it” process in circa 2008 and might be finished (maybe) in 2026 – so only 18 years. Flammeville – started in 2008 and…….maybe in 2023 it will be connected to the bars (15 years).
Taking nuclear’s only large-scale competitor: off-shore wind, GW-class wind farms are built within a year and every farm I have looked at has come in on (or before time) & at cost. Planning wrt to off-shore could be speeded up dramatically btw.
In the time it has taken to build H-Pointless (build cost £20bn) one could have been knocking out e.g. 18GW off-shore wind. Building 18GW of off-shore the CAPEX is circa £54bn. Under CfD UK off-shore auctions are delivering prices of circa £50 – £55/MWh – at parity with wholsale (circa 2020 & early 2021). So, UK serfs need pay no subsidy.
By contrast, the NAO estimate that H-Pointless will cost UK serfs around £50bn over the lifetime of the project. So you get 3.6GW of +/- dependable elec for £50bn or you get (derated to reflect capacity factor of 50%) 9GW of off-shore at…………..typical wholesale price & thus no cost to Uk serfs. Tough decision – only if you are tories.
By all means run the reactors you have, throw some money at Rolls-Royce for small-modular-reactors if you must, but build more nukes? I guess if you are tories, the bribes from the construction companies are welcome & may well be a deciding factor in more nuke build out (now that Russian sources of bungs have dried up). One thing for sure, renewable players do not fund the tories & that is probably a factor why they often get the shitty end of the stick.
I worry that it is only when so many people are made to live on the second floor of their houses because of flood risks that the penny will drop.
Yes, the Green New Deal and QuEST are the best hope we have.
I am a little concerned about throwing civil and military nuclear issues into the mix.
As a young man it was all very straight forward (as all things are to young men) – I was a unilateral nuclear disarmer and an advocate of civil nuclear power.
As an old(er) man I am much less certain. Why? Ukraine.
First, Chernobyl in 1986; second, unilateral Ukrainian disarmament in 1994 and today’s war.
Throw in the millions of deaths in China, India and elsewhere from fossil fuel burning and I am even more confused.
So, two conclusions….
First, I yearn for the certainty of youth (but that ain’t happening!)
Second, renewables are a good thing whatever your position on nuclear is…. it is not either/or.
For what it is worth, I’ve always been in favour of reducing the number of nuclear weapons. But we can’t uninvent them, so it seems to me we will always have them. I can’t imagine the circumstances in which the UK or the US would use them, but better that we and our friends have them than just our potential enemies, let alone non-state actors.
On civil nuclear, it has a host of problems, but I just can’t see the numbers adding up without it for a few more decades.
One of civil nuclear’s problems is that in any form that has actually run and isn’t just salesmen’s vapourware it doesn’t respond fast enough to resolve the intermittency issues of renewables, as gas turbines can. One approach is energy storage, but capacity is expensive and there are always net losses from conversion. In areas where the final load has plenty of inertia – building heating and cooling is one, and a big energy user – it should be possible to turn the usual assumptions around and modulate the load to availability on a very short timescale. Sites with their own PV or wind could potentially do that fairly easily and without any serious system complexity if the mechanical plant was designed with that type of operation in mind.
The cost of building new nuclear power stations are so enormous as there are inevitable overuns of expense and time as shown by the late opening of Sizewell B. Sizewell C will be a complete waste as it won’t come on stream for 10 years at least and if these resources were put into insulation and renewable the returns and help with the climate crisis would be many times more effective, let alone the intractable problem of dealing with mounting nuclear waste for thousands of years hence.
A Green New Deal appears to be so obviously the best rational way forward but it will meet almighty resistance from the Tories in the UK and Republicans in America whose politic pitch to their electorate is based on the wholly irrational.
I remember seeing research, some years ago, indicating that if full energy accounting was done over the hundreds of years necessary, more energy was put in with nuclear than was produced.
!5+ years of huge energy input to build the thing. Energy input to produce the fuel. 30 years of energy output. followed by energy input to decommission. And then energy input for the next few hundred years to look after the waste.
Do the sums, and it is found that more goes in than comes out.
Someone may know more about this than me.
I will see what research I can find on the internet, to give more specific numbers.
If anyone can point ne in the right direction, I will be grateful.
If all this is correct, it would indicate that nuclear is pointless, and is only leaving major problems for future generations.
This is as well as all the other negatives that have been listed here.