Nuclear Dogs

Dog walks in a post-nuclear landscape

By Kent Barker

            Our daily walk usually takes Myrtle and me down lanes and footpaths near our village.  We also like to tramp the Hills and beaches around Hastings.  Occasionally, though, the spirit of adventure takes us further afield and we venture to Dungeness to walk over the pebbles.

            There is an otherworldliness to this peninsular. Perhaps that’s why it was the chosen location for episodes of Doctor Who. It’s rather hard to define quite what sets it apart. It could be the complete absence of trees. Or the strange cabbage-like plants that struggle to survive on the inhospitable terrain.  Perhaps it’s the abandoned and rotting fishing boats or the improbable single gauge railway track, the grey lighthouse set inland from the ocean, the odd oak boardwalks leading from the road to the shore, or the dour wooden bungalows where some have chosen to make their home.  I mean, who would actively chose to live on the bleak monochrome promontory when there is so much lush and green Kentish countryside a few miles inland?

            Well, obviously and most famously Derek Jarman did.  But then anyone who was production designer for Ken Russell’s The Devils, or produced the homo-erotic Sebestiane might well have felt at home at Dungeness.

            But so far I’ve expended two hundred words on this strange place without mentioning the elephant that takes up so much of the room – the nuclear power plants.  Well, plant singular, now that the 1960s Maxnox reactor has been decommissioned.  But the Advanced Gas-cooled reactor, Dungeness B, is still busy smashing atoms and providing us with the electricity we have come to rely on.  But even this is nearing the end of its life and will be shut down in 2028.  Will another be built on the site? No, because of the fears of flood-risk.  Which hardly fosters confidence in the existing facility.  Just look what happened at Fukushima when the emergency generators were inundated by sea-water and stopped pumping vital coolant round the reactors. 

OK,  that was as a result of an earthquake initiated tsunami the odds of which happening may be a million to one against in the Straight of Dover,  but nuclear accidents can and do happen.  With devastating results.  Take Windscale in Cumbria, or Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, or Chernobyl in the Ukraine. 

But while the residents of Kent may be relieved that they’ve only another decade or so to go before their nuclear facility closes, those in Bridgwater or Western-Super-Mare or even Bristol and Cardiff may not be so sanguine. They are about to get a brand spanking new European Pressurised Reactor.  Well, they will if the government can sort out the financing.  The plant is expected to cost around £25 billion and investment was to have come from the French company EDF.  They secured a fixed supply-price deal under which they would have made profits of around 30% while British consumers would have paid   £92.50 per megawatt hour (the average UK wholesale price currently is around £50 PMH).  Thus Hinkley C would have been the most expensive nuclear power plant in the world.  However this is all in the past tense because EDF can’t afford the investment having run into financial problems with its nuclear plant at Flamanville in France.  Which hardly inspires confidence.  So what’s to be done?  Well whenever you want some cheap kit where do you look?  Why China of course.  Which is just what George Osborne is currently doing.

Now, I’ve nothing against trade with China, nor do I disparage the quality of Chinese technology.  But I do wonder that there isn’t anyone nearer to home who could build it for us.  British companies even.  And what, fundamentally, I don’t understand is why we can’t finance it ourselves?  It seems so simple.  The government issues bonds to raise the £25 billion and repays them with the profit from the sale of the electricity.  It was offering a 30% return to EDF and will, no doubt, have to make the Chinese a similar deal.  But, crucially, it doesn’t need to be done by the profit-motivated private companies!  Massive infrastructure projects like this surely are the responsibility of the public sector.

I was planning to go into the arguments for and against nuclear energy in the first place. Perhaps – and it’s a big perhaps – nuclear is the least environmentally damaging of the non-renewable forms of energy production.  Perhaps we do need the massive power stations for continuity of supply.  And perhaps ceasing to burn fossil fuels should be the main priority.

But hand in hand with that MUST surely be a much greater reliance on locally produced green energy.  Your solar panels and biomass boilers.  Except the government has slashed the subsidies for them. 

I’d sentence past and present energy ministers to live on Dungeness until they saw reason.