Another daft letter from the anti-nuclear brigade ...

About a fortnight ago I received a letter and enclosures from the "No need for nuclear" campaign, which I wrote up on this blog under the title "Elevating stupidity into an art form."

Today I received an almost identical letter with another copy of the same enclosures, but where the first letter had been addressed "Dear Councillor," this one was addressed to me by name and "as a former parliamentary candidate for the Conservative party."

Like the previous letter it is riddled with false statements such as the suggestion that "the government has never carried out an assessment of future electricity demand."

This is nonsense.

The previous government did just such an exercise last year, under Ed Miliband. They gave the results less publicity than in my opinion they should have, but nevertheless they did publish it online as an annex to of the "Low Carbon Transition Plan", launched in July 2009. This was picked up both by the Conservatives and the Daily Telegraph. As the Telegraph wrote here at the time, the annex "details supplies and expected demand between now and 2030."

They projected power demand out to 2030 and compared it to expected supply, and found that there was a serious risk of power cuts by 2017. The projected “energy unserved” gap in that year was 3000 megawatt hours per year - the equivalent of the whole of the Nottingham area being without electricity for a day.

By 2025 the former government projected that the situation would get worse with the shortfall hitting 7000 megawatt hours per year. That is the equivalent to an hour-long power cut for half of Britain.

Greg Clark who was then the Conservative spokesman on Energy and Climate change, assessed that exercise while we were in opposition, and although he wasn't terribly impressed with it, he concluded that if anything Ed Milliband was understating the risk of a serious shortage of electricity in the later years of this decade and an even worse one in the mid to late 2020's. You can read the comments he made at the time here.

All this was reported on this blog at the time: see my post "Left in the Dark" dated 2 September 2010.

Hence the central argument of the "No need for nuclear" campaign, that the government has never carried out an assessment of future eletricity demand, is just plain wrong.

But quite apart from the fact that the key arguments of the "No need for nuclear" campaigners are pure, 100% fertiliser, what I find amazingly inept about this letter is that, like the previous one, it asks me to write to my local MP.

What are these people on?

If you are sending letters to 2010 parliamentary candidates who are not now MPs themselves, who are their own local MPs going to be? Answer: their political opponents and personal rivals, making the former candidates just about the worst possible people through whom to try to influence those particular MPs.

However it is entirely possible that many Conservative or Liberal former candidates may have some political influence, not through the Labour MPs they fought, but through contacts with colleagues who are now ministers or sit on the government's backbenches.

The vast majority of Conservative MPs and candidates are pro-nuclear, but if the "No need for Nuclear" campaign had two working brain cells between them, they would know that if they can persuade a small minority of former Conservative candidates to help them, that help would be far more effective if they asked them to lobby their friends and contacts in government, not their own local opponents.

I am reminded of a statement by Voltaire: "I have only prayed one prayer in my life: 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it."

Comments

Anonymous said…
There is certainly a "need for Nuclear", but it makes no economic sense for new Nuclear in west cumbria. The only way to make it economicly viable is to blight the entire west cumbrian coast with new plants.
Tim said…
"Another daft letter from the anti-nuclear nutters"

I didn't know you were qualified to make judgements regarding people's mental health. There are some very good arguments against nuclear power. I for one, am very uncomfortable with the thought of plutonium being buried in the ground for a quarter of a million years.
Chris Whiteside said…
West Cumbria has the largest concentration of nuclear skills and expertise in the country and one of the best in the world.

Yes there is an issue with grid capacity, but that will apply whether we have new nuclear build or not - we need to double the grid capacity to deal with the conventional and wind generation which already has planning permission.

Nobody is suggesting that you just bury plutonium without enormously secure measures to contain it: personally I would much rather we use it as a power source rather than treat it as waste. I have been inside the plutonium containment facility at Sellafield, which is within 12 miles of my home: I was extremely impressed with the security of the facility.

I used the vernacular expression "nutter" to indicate very poor judgement - which I think the post bears out - rather than to seriously suggest mental illness. To avoid the possibility that any future readers might take the comment that way I have renamed the post.
Tim said…
Another thought - nuclear waste has to buried for so long, it might eventually be dug up by a successor species to Homo Sapiens.

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