Agony for British Greenies: Blair gives green light to new nuclear power plants

Amusing that it takes the spurious global warming scare to get them to do something sensible

Tony Blair has decided to back new nuclear power stations, which would be built on the sites of existing plants and presented to the public and his party as a job-creating answer to climate change. A year-long government inquiry into Britain's future energy requirements is expected by the Prime Minister to conclude that more nuclear energy is the only plausible answer to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The nuclear industry is willing to proceed without any government money on three conditions: that it is supported with planning applications, is helped with nuclear waste disposal and offered protection against an energy price crash.

In the past fortnight, the Prime Minister has privately disclosed that he is firmly in favour of more nuclear reactors, and that he expects the coming inquiry to make a case that can be supported by an all-party consensus. He believes the mood among Labour MPs has been irreversibly shifted by their involvement in the global warming debate, and that a backlash from the Iraq war has stoked concern about UK dependence on oil from the Middle East. Employment, Blair believes, will win over many on the Left - especially as 8,000 jobs are expected to be lost during the decommissioning of Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria, which employs 12,000.

However, the situation in Scotland is complicated by the Labour-Liberal Executive's opposition to any new station north of the Border. Yesterday, Scottish LibDem leader Nicol Stephen upped the ante in a speech to his party, saying the country should shift away from nuclear towards more wind and wave power.

The Prime Minister's position on nuclear power has been made clear by those who have spoken to him directly and believe he wants to send out a positive signal to the nuclear industry so that they start planning now. Blair is prepared to go as far as he can without prejudging the nuclear review. A fortnight ago, he made the case for nuclear power to the Labour Party conference while stopping short of calling for its implementation. "Global warming is too serious... to split into opposing factions on it," he told delegates. "And for how much longer can countries like ours allow the security of our energy supply to be dependent on some of the most unstable parts of the world?"

The Department of Trade & Industry confirmed on Friday that it has been holding discreet talks with major energy providers about nuclear options: E-On and RWE of Germany, and EdF of France. BNFL has a design for a new plant. The issue of nuclear power was avoided by the 2003 Energy White Paper, completed at a time when plunging wholesale energy prices triggered the collapse of British Energy. But rising prices make this viable again. A merchant banking source advising one of the firms said they would seek a system where this trap door could not open again - and, above all, a degree of political stability to ensure a future government would not change direction. "We need certainty about energy prices, and that is very different from subsidy," he said. "We need a thoroughly pro-nuclear White Paper, without any sense of an argument about it from the Treasury."

This may come from the inquiry into the economics of climate change commissioned by Chancellor Gordon Brown and led by Sir Nicholas Stern, deputy permanent secretary at the Treasury and former chief economist at the World Bank. The Chancellor now has family ties with the nuclear industry. Andrew Brown, the Chancellor's brother, is head of media relations at EdF, the French energy giant expected to be a main bidder.

Blair's advisers are pro-nuclear. Sir David King, his chief scientific officer, decided three years ago that renewable energy sources would not be developed fast enough to fill the gap expected in 2020. Other Cabinet sceptics are coming around. Margaret Beckett, Environment Secretary, last week claimed at a climate change conference that she has "never said" she is against nuclear power. This contrasts with remarks by Elliot Morley, environment minister, who said last month that "nuclear plants are expensive and if you're looking at the energy mix, I think you'll probably get more value from investment in clean coal".

Research so far shows that, while there is political opposition, it is far from overwhelming. A commons motion opposing more nuclear energy has been signed by only 41 of Labour's 354 MPs.

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ARCTIC WARMING BENEFICIAL

What Greenies never mention is that any climatic warming could be a good thing. Lots of Russians certainly wish for it. And the recent warming in parts of the Arctic looks like being a good example of an economic benefit

Global warming and melting ice caps are generating very good business for an elite band of Arctic entrepreneurs. But perhaps none has reason to celebrate more than Pat Broe. Mr Broe, a US railway magnate, bought the frozen and forlorn sub-Arctic Canadian port of Churchill, Manitoba, in 1997, for $7. Now he stands to make hundreds of millions of dollars as the retreating ice unlocks passages, opening the prospect of a longer shipping season. Mr Broe has become part of an Arctic land grab among businessmen, governments and developers who realise that the melting ice, a source of concern for environmentalists, is a boon for them.

Potential winners include Norway and Russia, according to The New York Times, which published an analysis yesterday of what one expert called “the Great Game in a cold climate”. The latest study of the Arctic ice cap showed that this summer it shrank to its smallest recorded size.

For Mr Broe, 57, from Denver, Colorado, the ice melt opens up the possibility of an “Arctic bridge”, a regular shipping lane from Murmansk, in Russia, to Churchill, a far shorter route from northern Europe to the North American continent than any other. The normal route from Murmansk to Canada ends in Thunder Bay, Ontario. That usually takes 17 days. Murmansk to Churchill can take only eight days. Currently, the shipping route from Murmansk to Churchill is open only from July until October, because the Hudson Bay ices over for the rest of the year. But Mr Broe and the Russian Government hope that the warmer weather will open the port for much longer — potentially up to eight months a year.

In recent years Churchill, which has 1,000 residents, could count on income only from several thousand tourists a year who visit to view polar bears and beluga whales. But in January, George Mamedov, the Russian Ambassador to Canada and a proponent of the Arctic bridge, visited, as have industrialists, shipping experts and grain producers.

Mr Broe brought Churchill almost as an afterthought. Having paid $11 million for 810 miles of denationalised railway tracks in Manitoba, he acquired the port at auction from a Canadian Government eager to rid itself of a money-loser. Since then, his company, OmniTrax, has spent $50 million dredging the port so that it can accommodate bigger ships and tankers. The ice melt could soon bring $100 million a year to Churchill. Ron Lemieux, the transportation minister of Manitoba, told The New York Times: “It’s the positive side of global warming"

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SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS AND THE NOBEL PRIZE

A tale with a very relevant moral

Time was when our best medical minds thought peptic ulcers were a lifestyle disease, the result of too much stress, too much spicy food or some combination thereof. For treatment, doctorly prescriptions included time off work, chewing your food thoroughly, popping antacids and drinking quantities of milk. In severe cases, patients went under the knife to have their stomach linings removed.

So it is not altogether surprising that when Australian physician Barry Marshall suggested, at a Brussels conference in 1983, that peptic ulcers might have a bacterial cause, his findings were dismissed by colleagues as "the most preposterous thing ever heard", according to his entry in the Current Biography Yearbook. Far from being deterred, however, Marshall pursued his line of inquiry into a bacterium named Helicobacter pylori, which had been discovered by his Australian collaborator Robin Warren and which seemed to be closely associated with gastric inflammation. Marshall even went so far as to make himself a research guinea pig by drinking a microbial stew that caused him to become ill but that further confirmed the validity of their hypothesis.

Today, the milk-and-rest cure is a thing of the past, surgeries are rare and a disease that affects four million Americans annually can usually be treated successfully within a few weeks with an antibiotic cocktail. For their findings, Marshall and Warren shared this year's Nobel Prize in Medicine. It's an inspired choice and a useful reminder that just because there's a scientific consensus, that doesn't mean it's true. .

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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