Geoffrey Lean: Nuclear nation? It's bunkum

Listening to ministers last week - and reading some newspapers - you'd have concluded that we stand on the threshold of a new atomic age. Gordon Brown has a "vision for a nuclear Britain", we were assured: "Britain is to become a nuclear nation" through "a nuclear expansion in the teeth of opposition from the green lobby".

All good stirring stuff, gulped down by nuclear supporters and opponents alike. The British Chambers of Commerce hailed "upgrading our nuclear capacity" as the only, environmentally acceptable way "for the UK to secure its energy needs". The Green Party accused ministers of committing the country to "a dirty, dangerous and expensive future".

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They can calm down. Any suggestion that last week's White Paper presaged even a modest nuclear growth is, as Sir Bernard Ingham, one of the country's most outspoken atomic advocates, would put it, "bunkum and balderdash". Despite the hype, the White Paper put far more emphasis on saving energy and on increasing power from renewable sources, while doing almost nothing to increase the prospects for new nuclear power stations.

Even under its most optimistic projections, 20 years hence the amount of energy Britain gets from the atom will fall to a fraction of what it is today. Far from the promised "new generation" of nuclear power stations, it is possible that not one will ever be built.

Let's go back just over a quarter of a century to the moment that best matched last week. In 1981, Margaret Thatcher's government published its own White Paper promising to build five new nuclear power stations. Only one came into being, 15 years later, at Sizewell

"That was then," atomic optimists retort. "This is now." Indeed so. Then, Britain had a nationalised electricity industry, a monopoly headed by nuclear enthusiasts. If they and ministers wanted nuclear plants they could simply decide to build them, the true cost could be hidden, and they had no competition to worry about. Yet they could not pull it off.

Now it's infinitely tougher . Britain has a liberalised, fiercely competitive electricity market. Despite ministers' self-important talk last week of their "need to make a decision", they determine virtually nothing: it's all decided by the generators and the market. And no nuclear power plant has been built, anywhere in the world in such liberalised conditions.

The Trade and Industry Secretary, Alistair Darling, last week sought to disguise his impotence with a curious, often repeated, form of words. He needed to decide, he said, whether "to allow energy companies to invest in new nuclear power stations". But that is nonsense. As he admits, when challenged, such investment has never been disallowed: he would never have the power to stop it..

At no time in the past two decades has there been anything to stop companies building new reactors if they so decided. They chose, for good commercial reasons, not to. And despite the rhetoric, nothing that happened last week makes the investment any more likely.

Even at best, it's a big risk. Because nuclear power plants are so expensive and take so long to build, investors are faced with laying out vast sums with no hope of receiving any revenue for at least a decade. In a liberalised market, they can have no certainty of how great or small that revenue will be, but they do know they will have to pay vast amounts to dispose of nuclear waste.

Worse, no one knows how much building the reactors will cost. Professor Tom Burke of Imperial College - an aide to three past environment secretaries - says present "guesses" by nuclear advocates range from $1,000 (£504) to $2,083 per kilowatt hour which "certainly looks like 'I don't know' to me". In fact, he adds, the real cost of eight reactors built in Asia is more than twice as high as the most expensive estimate, $4,540 per kilowatt hour.

The cost of building Sizewell more than doubled during its construction. And a much-hyped reactor being built in Finland, the first in Europe for ages, has achieved the extraordinary feat of falling 18 months behind schedule in the first year after it was ordered. The White Paper did nothing to alter these financial facts of life. What would, of course, make a difference would be government subsidies big enough to make the investment attractive. But Gordon Brown has long ruled out providing public money.

Some environmentalists believe ministers are seeking how to provide a back-door bung, perhaps through helping pay for disposing of nuclear waste. They seized on further strange language from Mr Darling, when he insists companies would have to pay their "full share" of the cost. By definition, they point out, a "share" is only part of the total. Are ministers secretly planning to pick up a hefty part of the rest? If so, they will have to be careful not to fall foul of strict EU competition rules.

But even if companies do decide - or are bribed - to build new reactors, don't expect Britain to become a "nuclear nation". Far from the much-touted "expansion", the most that could happen over the next quarter of a century is a slight amelioration of a precipitous decline.

At present, Britain gets 18 per cent of its electricity from the atom, down from 30 per cent at its peak in the 1990s. As old power stations go offline, this will decline to about 5 per cent by 2020; by 2024, only Sizewell will be operating.

Mr Darling refuses to say how many new reactors he would like, repeating that this is for the companies to decide. But the small print of the White Paper suggests that only between two and four would be built by 2030. That would mean that Britain then generated only between 25 and 40 per cent as much nuclear energy as today. Some "expansion". Some "nuclear vision".

Where the White Paper did provide for ambitious expansion was in energy saving and renewables, but you could not have told that from last week's nuclear nonsense. The atomic hype made ministers appear bold, and provided a story, but remained bunkum and balderdash nonetheless.