When PR Goes Nuclear  

I missed this article in last Friday's Financial Review, but the ever reliable Energy Bulletin picked it up.

In the plush surroundings of the Army & Navy Club on London's Pall Mall, Mike Alexander, chief executive of British Energy, was holding court. Assembled before him were more than a hundred leading figures from the UK's energy industry - all there at the behest of the Energy Industries Club, an industry body that keeps its membership secret.

The point of the event, held just a few weeks ago on March 15, was to hear a keynote speech, to be delivered by Alexander, with the title "UK Nuclear Energy: fuel of the future?" It was not, however, a purely private affair. Around the room were a selection of top opinion formers: analysts, corporate traders and members of the media. The journalists could not report the event directly - the invitations were based on so-called Chatham House rules, meaning it was for "background use only". What they were meant to take home was a message: nuclear power is coming back.

Alexander's speech itself was simple. Within the next 20 years, he said, Britain's nuclear power stations will come to the end of their operating lives. To meet the country's climate-change targets, they must be replaced with some form of power generation that does not produce the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. Anywhere else, that line might have prompted some sharp questions. But for Alexander, whose company owns two-thirds of Britain's nuclear power stations, the audience was an unusually receptive one - and not just because of the fine wines.

They laughed at his mockery of the nuclear-waste problem: his plants produced a trivial volume of waste, equivalent to 24 double-decker buses a year, he said. A ripple of "hear, hears" greeted his suggestion that the next generation of reactors would produce half that waste and a lot more power. And when he cracked a couple of jokes about windpower, gusts of raucous laughter went round the room.

Taken on its own, it might have seemed like just another business lunch. For some of the guests, however, the proceedings were a little familiar. They had heard the same arguments and met the same people at a series of other events in the past few months. It was all part of a carefully planned strategy. From being a piece of history, the nuclear industry - a fading dinosaur that has wasted billions and left a toxic legacy that will cost billions more - is pushing itself back into the headlines, rebranded as the only source of the cheap, secure and clean energy demanded by modern Britain. The real "green" alternative.

...

Last year the RAE put out a paper on electricity prices suggesting that new nuclear plants could produce power far more cheaply than even coal. For those with long memories, it was reminiscent of the "power too cheap to meter" promise made by Walter Marshall, one of the architects of Britain's atomic reactor program in the 1950s. But, tellingly, the RAE has also told the government that it must create a market for nuclear by ensuring the "long-term stability of electricity prices". This is shorthand for the nuclear industry's real agenda: a new system of subsidies to ensure it is never again exposed to the chill winds of a free market. The industry even has a name for it: the Security of Supply Obligation.

In other nuclear news, Brazil has announced plans to build seven nuclear power plants.

Brazil has plans to build seven nuclear power plants reported Sunday the Sao Paulo press quoting government officials. The country currently has two nuclear power plants in operation and the major expansion is contemplated under the new Brazilian Nuclear Program (PNB), which the government is reviewing.

President Lula da Silva officials told newspaper O Estado de Sao Paulo that the government considers the new nuclear plants essential to expanding Brazil's role as a player on the world stage and bolstering its bid for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.

Yet Sweden has begun closing plants down (with some reservations).

Back in Australia, The Hun reports that the government is looking to further boost our uranium export industry (continuing Lord Downer of Baghdad's plan to make Australia the Saudi Arabia of the nuclear age) - while another example of the problems with uranium mining surfaced at ERA's operations in the Northern Territory (though obviously the fine isn't much of a deterrent against putting uranium into your worker's drinking water).

Northern Territory based miner and producer of uranium oxide Energy Resources Of Australia Limited (ERA) were today fined $150,000 being successfully prosecuted on charges brought by the Northern Territory Department of Business, Industry and Resource Development under the Mining Management Act. The charges related to an incident concerning the connection of the drinking and process water systems at the Ranger uranium processing plant in Kakadu National Park in March 2004. Twenty-eight workers had fallen ill with spontaneous vomiting, gastric upsets, headaches or skin rashes after drinking or showering in the water, which contained 400 times more uranium than recommended the court had heard.

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