ConDemned to a nuclear nightmare

When Japan and Germany decided to halt nuclear power dependency in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster, some hoped it was a turning point. But the deal with French and Chinese corporations announced today marks an abrupt end to the dream that nuclear power might be phased out.

Instead, vast amounts of taxpayers’ money is to be handed to French and Chinese state-owned corporations to build a new power station in Somerset and be guaranteed a minimum price for the power it will generate in ten year's time.  

Hinkley Point will become the first new nuclear plant in Europe since Fukushima. That plant continues to leak massively to this day and was the second worst nuclear accident after Chernobyl in 1986. Then, radioactive fallout equivalent to 20 Hiroshima bombs damaged the health of countless people in northern Europe and continues to blight their lives.

The price agreed for power generation at Hinkley is at double the current market rate. This means that the companies are guaranteed longer-term revenues of around £80bn, according to some calculations. A scandal, or what?

The government has agreed to provide some £10bn guarantees to build the power station, thus subsidising nuclear energy at a higher rate than renewables – which are becoming more and more economic.

EDF, which is almost entirely owned by the French state, took over British Energy in 2008-9 and now operates 15 nuclear reactors in the UK. Nuclear expansion received a huge boost after the Blair governments enthusiastically endorsed it.

New Labour’s enthusiasm was matched a few years later by that of former anti-nuclear campaigner George Monbiot, who experienced a strange conversion in 2011 after Fukushima, when he declared himself pro-nuclear and made a vicious attack on the highly respected, Dr Helen Caldicott.

Despite the fact that the nuclear industry is so dangerously accident-prone, the companies chosen by Osborne and his ConDem clique are most obviously the least transparent and least responsible organisations to run such a dangerous industry.

There is absolutely no reason to believe that EDF and CGN will be any less negligent or open to scrutiny than the companies which built and supplied the nuclear reactors behind the Fukushima disaster.

Quite the opposite. Earlier this year, EDF pursued anti-fracking campaigners No Dash For Gas for £5m. EDF dropped its lawsuit eventually but only after the protesters agreed to a permanent injunction against entering EDF sites.

Less well-known is no doubt the fact that the head and deputy head of EDF’s nuclear security operation were jailed for three years each by a French Court in 2011.  They had spied on Greenpeace and hacked into the organisation’s computer systems.

Any misdoings by the Chinese state-owned CGN will virtually untraceable or accountable. Greenpeace campaigner in Hong Kong, Prentice Koo, warns that "Their [Chinese nuclear operators] track record is really bad and that they never give reasons for nuclear accidents.”

He told the BBC’s China reporter that "The nuclear industry in China enjoys such a privileged position that they have to pay only very limited sums in compensation if there is any major incident."

Thus, EDF and its Chinese partners will profit handsomely but are most unlikely to be responsible for any accidents or clean-up. So, cheap power generation, safety, transparency, accountability? You have to be joking.

Going nuclear at vast expense is a desperate act by a country without a sustainable energy strategy. It won’t even help to keep the lights on as it's a decade away. Consumers will pay through the nose and no doubt be asked to foot the eventual bill for storing radioactive waste.

Energy minister Michael Fallon is hailing the process as a “nuclear renaissance”. Actually, it’s more like an expensive nuclear nightmare the ConDems are holding out before us. 

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

EDF has ConDems over a nuclear barrel

So much for the so-called virtues of the free market. The Coalition government, desperate to maintain energy supplies at any price, has abandoned its previous policy and will now offer nuclear generating companies cash to build new power stations.

French-owned global energy giant EDF has demanded – and is going to get – 40-year's worth of subsidies in what amounts to an outright state bribe to run new plant in the UK.

The ConDems swore after the election that new nuclear expansion would have to pay for itself. But now the government is frantic because the dash for gas has left the UK frighteningly dependent on a global market where a dwindling supply is meeting a growing demand.

The on-shore dash for gas opened up by the government will allow fracking and coal-bed methane capture. Even fully exploited, however, these deposits are small potatoes, leaving the UK reliant on ever-more expensive gas imports.

There are new sources of gas from wholesale fracking in the US but this won't reduce prices, only temporarily fill the gap left by giant north European fields that are now running down.

Two of the major energy corporations have decided not to bid for the UK's new nuclear plants, so EDF is the last firm standing. From that monopoly position they are demanding "contracts for difference" that guarantee a minimum price. If the market price falls below that, the government will pay the balance.

So as youth centres close, and elderly and sick people die lying in their own excrement, and months of austerity stretch into years to appease the financial markets, EDF will be shouting "Vive l’Entente Cordiale" as they rake in taxpayers’ money.

Alistair Buchanan, head of energy regulator Ofgem, is warning that UK customers face higher bills for years not as a result of subsidies for renewables (Tory Neanderthals take note) but because of reliance on expensive imported gas.

So what the 15 nuclear energy staff currently seconded to government departments (according to campaign group Nuclear Spin), are whispering in ministers' ears is something alone the lines of "come on you might as well agree a subsidy price, because it will probably never kick in. Prices will go on soaring for years, and we'll make a fortune, but the guaranteed minimum will help us borrow the £16 billion we need to build the new plants."

Now the gas plant owners are not happy. If nuclear is getting subsidies, they are demanding the same to build new gas plants to replace the older coal-fired stations that are closing.

And the oil industry – well that is already floating on a sea of tax breaks. A briefing published by Platform shows that BP's pre-tax profits tripled in 10 years from 2001 to 2011 but its UK tax payments stayed more or less the same. Profits went from $13.1bn in 2001 to $39.8bn in 2011 – tax payments from £707 million to £730 million. If the corporation tax payments had risen in line with profits that should be $2.1bn.

Shell actually paid less tax - down from £958 million in 2006 to £783 million in 2011. This despite global pre-tax profits rising from $44.6 billion in 2006 to $55.6 billion in 2011. So profits up 25% - tax to HMRC down 18%.

The energy market delivers nothing but a lose-lose scenario for ordinary people. They pay ever-higher fuel bills, subsidise energy corporation profits through their taxes, get no help to make their homes more energy efficient, and suffer the effects of climate change and pollution. And they watch as the nuclear industry leaves deadly waste lying around in canisters for our grandchildren to worry about. It is, as Buchanan said, a "car-crash of an energy policy".

Access to energy at an affordable price should be a basic right. Profiteering corporations have all but converted that right into a privilege, like so much else in Britain. Lower fuel bills and a transition to a clean, green energy future demand democratic ownership and control of the industry. That’s a goal we’ll have to achieve ourselves.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Corporations cash in on climate change funds

As governments meet in Doha to discuss the transfer of funds from rich to poor countries to help them adapt to climate change, the developing world is asking both “where’s the money” and who is benefiting from the small amount allocated so far.

A Fast-start Fund (FSF) of £30bn was to be completed by December 2012, and then another £100bn by 2020. Now it’s clear that there will be no commitment to any further funding on the table this week.

The US, EU, Canada and Japan have made clear they will not say how or when they will commit to further funding. EU representative Peter Betts said they would not agree any targets: "These are tough financial times in Europe, as I'm sure you have noticed."

Jonathan Pershing from the US asked for trust: “The question really is did we do the first one and the answer is yes. Are we working on the second? The answer is yes." But given that the Obama administration’s total climate aid for this year was just £1.7bn, that trust is not likely to be translated into action.

The FSF replacement Green Climate Fund has a completely empty bank account. In any case, as Al Gore pointed out, the FSF money had mostly been moved around from existing aid commitments, and whereas grants were promised, they were actually mostly given out as loans with strings.

Much of it was handed out directly to corporations to do projects. The World Development Movement reports that UK climate finance (channelled through the World Bank) has been used to fund wind farms in Oaxaca, Mexico, which are controlled by French electricity giant EDF.

All of the energy produced is being used to provide cheap power to Walmart, and none is going to local people. The wind farms have been built on indigenous people’s land without their consent.

The EDF/Walmart involvement highlighted by WDM is not an aberration – it entirely represents the World Bank’s view on how to use climate mitigation funds. A recent report for the WB stated:

“The large potential for private investment to achieve climate-related objectives justifies using a substantial share of the public funding available in and before 2020 to stimulate this investment…

“Not all public funding will be used to stimulate private investment, but all else equal, channelling public funding through instruments that catalyze additional international private investment in a given action yields greater benefits than using the public funding directly for the same type of action.

“Over the period between now and 2020, public instruments will need to have the flexibility to respond to various dynamic factors such as emerging domestic climate policies in developing countries, and the expected scaling up of carbon markets.”

Translated into English that last paragraph means that developing country governments can decide to use climate change money for all sorts of policies – to leverage in land-grabbing investment funds; to switch to GM crops; to earn carbon credits from bio-fuel crops or indeed to generate power for Walmart.

The problem is that the Bank is not wrong in thinking that the only way to get things to happen quickly in today’s world is to get the global corporations on board. They have the know-how, the infrastructure, and the drive to do new things. What they don’t have is any real interest in mitigating climate change – profit is their only game and so the money will serve that end only.

Any tangential benefits, for example small reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, will be more than offset by their continuing rapacity everywhere they operate to resource, produce, distribute and sell goods.

A transformation of ownership and control of these corporations, as collectively owned democratic co-operatives, could change all that. Then the skills, knowledge and resources of what are after all the world’s biggest and most dynamic organisations, could be harnessed to tackle climate change and improve the lives of millions.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Coalition takes greenwash to a new level

ConDem coalition energy policy is being made on the run, in secret and in cahoots with the energy corporations. The self-styled “greenest-ever government” is engaged in a behind-the-scenes dash for fossil fuel and nuclear.

Here’s the evidence for the prosecution:

1. Having closed down one loss-making fuel reprocessing plant at Sellafield, the government has announced plans to build another at a cost of £3bn of taxpayers’ money. So much for claims that new nuclear plants will have to be financed privately, including dealing with waste. The plant will try to transform Britain’s stockpile of nuclear waste into mox (mixed-oxide) fuel for a new generation of thermal light water reactors. As Douglas Parr, policy director at Greenpeace UK, said: "This proposal will lead to a subsidised plant creating subsidised fuel so that subsidised operators can produce subsidised electricity and then receive subsidised waste disposal. The only winners in this are the nuclear operators, already rich with their 18% domestic fuel price rises this year."

2. The government has been passing on details of Greenpeace’s legal challenge to new nuclear plants, to the Nuclear Industry Association and even directly to French nuclear giant EDF, the most likely candidate to build any new plants. Greenpeace has complained to the High Court and says it is an abuse of power that “prevents democratic scrutiny”.

3. Green MP Caroline Lucas has exposed oil and nuclear industry penetration and influence in Whitehall. She has found that 50 employees from companies like EDF, Npower and Centrica have been seconded to work on energy issues in government departments, free of charge, over the past four years. "Companies such as the big six energy firms do not lend their staff to government for nothing – they expect a certain degree of influence, insider knowledge and preferential treatment in return," said Lucas, who also found that the government had met with the “big six” producers and the power trade associations almost 200 times since the May 2010 election.

4. The government has been covertly passing information to Canadian diplomats lobbying to stop the European Union classifying oil extracted from tar sands as having a heavy carbon footprint - which of course it does. This would make the oil less attractive to European fuel suppliers, trying to meet requirements under the Fuel Quality Directive.

5. In his autumn statement, Chancellor Osborne took £1bn out of the budget that had been set aside to develop carbon capture and storage to spend on other new infrastructure. He promised £250m of public money to help industries with high emissions of greenhouse gas subvert EU carbon caps, and also pledged a review of “green regulations” to “clear the way for development and economic growth”. In other words, dump them all.

6. The draft rules for the government’s much-vaunted Green Investment Bank would not allow it carry through a plan to make millions of homes more energy efficient. Instead the bank will have to invest on commercial terms and show a profit. As a result, it is unlikely to invest in areas that are good for the environment, but deemed too risky by other lenders, though that was supposed to be the point. The bank’s funding is no longer put at £3bn but “up to £3bn” and it will not start operating until 2016 at the earliest.

We hereby find this government guilty of greenwash, building extensively on the example of their New Labour predecessors, and we award environment secretary Chris Huhne the “hypocrite of the year award 2011”. How do they sleep at night? No problem because they are fulfilling their role as they see it - promoting growth at all costs during what is rapidly turning into a global slump of the capitalist system.

Penny Cole
Environment editor