The View from England: Myopic politicians seeing nuclear at last

Politicians everywhere have a tendency to make decisions based on short-term outcomes that might become catastrophic in the long term. There are few better examples of this than legislation in London 250 years ago.  

In one of the U.K.’s worst ever political decisions (and we’ve had a few), Parliament voted on Apr. 27, 1773, to help the financially troubled East India Co. (EIC) by allowing it to sell tea from China directly to the American colonies. Formed in 1600, at its peak EIC was the largest corporation in the world and had a private army of over 250,000 soldiers (twice the size of the then British army).  

The Tea Act, which received royal assent in May 1773, also reinforced an existing tax on tea in the American colonies (and so implicitly an acceptance of Parliament’s right to impose taxation). This outraged the good folk of Massachusetts and led to the Boston Tea Party of December 1773. The British government considered the spoiling of a cargo of tea an act of treason and responded harshly. By April 1775 the episode had escalated into a rather unfortunate revolution. EIC survived for another 100 years but our American colony was gone by 1783.  

Because they have relatively short-term tenures, many, perhaps most, politicians have a tendency to myopia; they are not able clearly to see objects that are far away (also a weakness, I would argue, of chief executives). Our leaders then overcompensate by stating the blindingly obvious. Witness the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who recently announced “The wind doesn’t always blow, or the sun always shine.” Speaking on the Ides of March, Jeremy Hunt warned Parliament that the U.K. is facing a shortfall in reliable sources of energy.  

Historically, Great Britain has been characterized as an island of coal being buffeted by gale-force winds in a sea of oil and gas. Issues with solar energy hardly come as a surprise, but we should never have become short of energy.  

Our politicians have ‘history’ with regard to resource planning. This political ineptitude was described rather well in 1945 by the Welsh labour politician Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan (1897-1960). Bevan (one of the founders of the British welfare state, including the National Health Service) noted “This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time.”  

In his budget speech, Hunt said nuclear power was “vital to meet our net-zero obligations,” and described it as a “critical source of cheap and reliable energy.” Hunt added that he wanted to encourage private investment in new nuclear power by classifying it as ‘environmentally sustainable,’ and would launch a new organization, Great British Nuclear, to help deliver nuclear projects.  

In Bevan’s time, the U.K. relied almost exclusively on coal-fired power stations for its electricity. Our electricity is now generated by a mixture of gas, nuclear and increasingly renewables. In a LinkedIn article on March 10, Professor Brian Smart (formerly of the universities of Strathclyde and Heriot-Watt in Scotland) called for “true organizing genius” to secure this energy supply and take the nation forwards.  

Professor Smart noted the “rush to renewables,” and away from fossil fuels, because of genuine concerns over greenhouse gas emissions driving global warming. The underlying issue, he warned, is that wind and solar are inherently intermittent in their performance, and, in the absence of sufficient compensatory energy storage, reliance has to be placed on other means of guaranteed generation — gas and nuclear in particular.  

While nuclear has high assurance, large reactors have to be operated continually at their design load. It is adjustable gas-powered generation, therefore, that is frequently used to compensate for the day-to-day underperformance of renewables. Since the Russia-Ukraine war, however, operational problems have developed with regard to the security, assurance and affordability of gas-powered electricity.  

Professor Smart suggests the solution lies in boosting the capacity of two types of stored energy.  

First, the short-term vagaries of renewable energy should be compensated through a program of building battery facilities and hydrogen storage.  

Second, the longer-term issues of supply security could be offset by building large strategic resources. Professor Smart suggested that we need to find a new green way of emulating our former coal-fired power stations, which were able to store six months of coal (and operate continuously but variably). Gas-fired generators, coupled with carbon capture and storage, are the only readily scalable source that can do this now. Gas-storage reservoirs could be filled when the price of gas was low, which would help address affordability as well as security.  

There are four tenets of a nation’s electricity supply. The aggregate system must be secure (insulated from being weaponized by a foreign power), assured (able to provide an absolute continuity of supply), affordable and compatible with the shift to net zero greenhouse gas emissions.  

We are signed up for the fourth of these tenets, but politicians everywhere need to tackle the other three imperatives while recognizing the inherent danger of relying on the wind blowing and the sun shining.  

Dr. Chris Hinde is a mining engineer and the director of Pick and Pen Ltd., a U.K.-based consulting firm. He previously worked for S&P Global Market Intelligence’s Metals and Mining division.