More energy insecurity
Here’s Business Secretary John Hutton on the push for nuclear energy:
Mr Hutton said: “Nuclear power is an essential part of our future energy mix. And, alongside a 10-fold increase in renewables and investment in clean coal technology, it will help wean us off our dependency on oil and protect us against the politicisation of energy supplies.
It doesn’t matter where you stand on the issue of nuclear power - for or against - the assertion that increasing our number of nuclear power stations will ‘protect us against the politicisation of energy supplies’ is manifest bollocks.
Is the UK self sufficient in uranium? No. We’ll have to get it from somewhere else then. That makes notions of so-called ‘energy security’ shakey from the outset. Canada and Australia are the biggest producers. They also happen to be democratic, white and friendly to us (which is nice).
You don’t have to get very far down the list to find that some of the other uranium producers are proper bastards. Kazakstan, Uzbekistan, increasingly tonto Russia, Namibia, and Niger, for example.
(Although to be fair, it’s France, which generates 80 per cent of its electricity from nuclear, that has the big stake in Niger’s uranium. Not that Niger’s people slumped, as they are, at 177 in the United Nations Human Development Index, have seen much benefit.)
So, do we swap one set of oil-supplying bastards - the Saudis, and all - for a different set of uranium-supplying bastards? We might have the decision taken out of our hands if American proposals to form a new uranium cartel are realised. A US State Department advisory body (chaired by no less a figure than Iraq war architect Paul Wolfowitz) has suggested the US and six other producer nations get together to form a ‘uranium bank’ to control supply. Goodbye Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, hello Organization of the Uranium Exporting Countries.
We’re on the verge of a ‘nuclear renaissance’ we’re told. (The use of ‘renaissance’ is spin, by the way - it evokes a golden age of exploration and enlightenment rather than, in the instance of the nuclear industry, a retreat to ignorance and cover-up). The world and his dog wants a nuclear reactor for some unknown reasons (if someone’s worked out how to keep a 100 per cent safety record and found a safe way of getting rid of the waste they’re keeping bloody quiet about it).
Are we to expect that this cartel’s decisions won’t be politicised in the face of growing competition for uranium whose supply, we might add, is expected to run out before the end of the century at current rates of consumption? The mere suggestion of creating such a body means the ‘politicisation of energy supplies’ as Hutton puts it.
Posted on July 22nd, 2008 at 5:39 pm
| See also • Over on Nuclear Reaction • Water, water everywhere • Atomkraft #1 |
• Permalink • Trackback • Subscribe |
|
• Filed under Eye Catching Initiatives, New Labour, Nuclear: power and weapons, The coming apocalypse |
• |
The Australian government estimate they have between 40 and 50 years of uranium reserves at current levels of consumption. Increase nuclear power generation significantly and that drops sharply.
Energy security? Bollocks more like.
Jim Bliss’s latest blog post… Wikipedia Album Generator
The IAEA ‘Red Book’ says we have enough worldwide for a century which is just about the most optimistic offical estimate I’ve seen. And that includes geological estimates of uranium that hasn’t even been found yet.
I think by ‘politicisation’ the little scrote means ‘not *quite* so many wars*’.
We sit on top of a nuclear reactor - it’s called the earth’s core, and it’s not going to run out in 100 years? Get going on the geothermal, wave and tidal, for fuck’s sake.
Damn right. There’s a province in China whose wind farms will soon be producing more electricity in a year than a state-of-the-art EPR nuclear reactor. Bring it on.
Some rare good news on this subject
Jim Bliss’s latest blog post… Wikipedia Album Generator
The last thing we need is Russia getting more control over energy supplies.
http://lettersfromatory.wordpress.com
Is that because they’re the Evil Enemy this decade?
ejh’s latest blog post… But not today the struggle
Aside from developing both time-travel and terraforming technology (to skip back a few million years and significantly alter the geological structure of the planet) I’m not sure there’s much can be done about that.
The Russians have oil and gas. We want it, and we are not — despite plenty of rhetoric — taking any genuine steps to develop alternatives, and/or reduce our consumption.
It’s not Russia’s fault if we can’t come up with an energy policy that isn’t completely ridiculous.
Jim Bliss’s latest blog post… Wikipedia Album Generator
But fast breeder reactors, viable as other fuel runs, out have approximately 5 billion years of Uranium 238 available. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power
That’s as may be but the UK, particularly, doesn’t have a great record with them.
I agree but just in case we don’t discover a cheap, abundant, renewable, clean energy source in the next hundred years or so it might be worth carrying out some more research into the technology rather than removing funding as the UK government did in 1994.
It would probably be a more worthwhile pursuit for PhD physicists than working for hedge funds.