Written evidence to be reported to the House
Energy Bill
12:00 pm
Tom Burke: Yes, as a matter of practice—either globally or in this country—it contributes very little. Let me take you through the rationale for that. The Chinese have the world’s most ambitious nuclear power programme. They propose to build 40 reactors by 2030 and, being the Chinese, there is some good prospect that they will do that. If they succeed, nuclear power will contribute 4 per cent. to China’s electricity production by 2030. The rest will come from coal. The point that we both made is that it cannot contribute significantly at that scale. If you take the broader global picture, and you look at the number of reactors that have to be built between now and 2030 in order to keep the current level of nuclear contribution, you have to build 42 GW between now and 2015 and 168 GW in the 10 years after that. That is what you have to do to maintain the current contribution of nuclear power. If you look at our current rate of build, which is about 1 GW a year, even if you scale that up dramatically—and there are good reasons to believe that that might be quite difficult—the best that you can hope for is a slow decline in the contribution of nuclear power to meeting our emissions reductions targets. Meanwhile, a large number of coal-fired power stations will be constructed. If they operate over their 50-year lifetime, they will make it extremely difficult for us to meet global and national goals for reducing our emissions to the point at which the climate is secure and stable. There is a strong evidence base that nuclear power cannot contribute very much.
Were you magically to overcome all the extraordinary difficulties of rate and magnitude of building new nuclear power stations, of course they could contribute. In the specific context of the United Kingdom, there is a need to replace existing nuclear and some coal-fired power stations that are coming offline, as I think you, Minister, and others have pointed out. The emerging problem arises some time in the period between 2012 and 2015—estimates vary—but the most optimistic assessment of when new nuclear can contribute to meeting the generation gap is 2017, and that is EDF’s estimate. I think that the Government’s own consultation paper suggested that it might actually be a bit later than that, at around 2020.
In the meantime, we will fill the gap with fossil fuels, so the issue becomes one of priorities. What do you think it is most important to concentrate public policy on doing? I suspect that my view is shared by my colleagues, although they will speak for themselves. It is that it is most important to concentrate on the fact that if we do not do something very quickly to make fossil-fuel-fired electricity generation carbon neutral, we will have made commitments that will be extremely expensive and possibly impossible to unravel.