Not far from me, in the lovely Leicestershire village of Nevill Holt, for some reason a replica of the notorious “Ed Stone” has been erected in a churchyard. It’s all part of the small but growing Nevill Holt art and literature festival, and I imagine it’s to remind passersby of the ephemeral nature of so much of politics – if not life.
If you recall, the mini obelisk was commissioned as a stunt by the Labour Party for the 2015 general election, held a decade ago last month. Ed Miliband was then the leader of the party, and had trouble persuading people of his seriousness. Hell, yes, he did!
The idea was to – all too literally – carve his promises into stone to prove just how serious he was. He lost.
To be fair to Miliband, one of politics’ great survivors, he himself tells the story about when he was last a cabinet minister, during the Brown government. He was a great advocate for building more nuclear power stations in a carbon-free future, but as a here-today-gone-tomorrow energy secretary, he couldn’t do much about it before Labour lost the 2010 election. Only now can he launch a renewed attempt to build Sizewell C, with £14.2bn of public money behind it.
Whether he’s still in government by the time it opens, circa 2036, is debatable. As Miliband knows better than most, general elections have a habit of thwarting all kinds of ambitions.
The nuclear point is that these nukes take so long to build, are so costly, so prone to overruns and vulnerable to unpredictable trends in global energy prices – it’s impossible to say whether Sizewell C is a good idea or not. But the pressure of current assumptions means we will have to go ahead anyway. The private sector can’t and won’t bear the risk, so it’s down to the taxpayers.
As things stand, and given that fossil fuels are undesirable on climate grounds, atomic power is the only way we can guarantee a reliable baseload of energy for when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. It could be that by 2040, say, battery or other storage of electricity generated by renewables could be so advanced that nuclear power is unnecessary – or that someone will invent such a clean and secure system of carbon storage that we can go back to burning coal, as Nigel Farage suggests. Albeit, he doesn’t mind the soot, or, apparently, sentencing young Welsh people to an old age of emphysema and pneumoconiosis.
But maybe those developments don’t materialise, and we will need the kind of plentiful, clean, green, cheap, safe nuclear electricity that has been so long promised to us. In the 1950s, they said it would be so inexpensive it wouldn’t be worth metering it. It’s a strange case of walking into something knowing that that could end up as a financial or environmental catastrophe, or both, because the alternatives are even less bearable.
Could the Rolls-Royce mini-reactors be more problematic? We know where we are with big nukes. Mostly they’re fine, and, if they ever lived up to their scientific promise, they’d bring the planet to the closest it has ever come to utopia. But we also know it can go very, very wrong: Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and other, hushed-up “incidents” periodically remind us that, so far, utopia remains just a nice idea.
Somehow, we can rationalise the risks. Having one down the road, on a corner where the petrol station used to be, with all the secret sinister menace that lies beneath its humming, brightly-coloured exterior, is another matter. Will they really be safe? Where does the nuclear waste go – green bin or brown bin? Will the council come and get it every week or every fortnight? What will a mini-nuke do to property prices?
People are already nervous enough about moving close to an electricity substation or a quarry. Imagine this – one morning you’ll be strolling down to the park to give the dog some exercise, and ka-boom! The roof’s blown off the local baby nuke, and glowing hot radioactive ash is showering the surrounding streets. A small armageddon, but an armageddon all the same.
Widespread use of nuclear power is the kind of thing that, among other things, such as leaving a toxic legacy for thousands of years and an upsurge in deformities and cancers, could end political careers. Even Ed Miliband’s.
