Nuclear power puts Gordon in a devil of a fix

The Prime Minister has presented as a fait accompli - and persuaded much of the commentariat of whom New Labour is so wary - that a new fleet of atomic reactors is inevitable, a done deal and that the age of nuclear new build is upon us.

When Brown announced new nuclear would be Britain's solution to the energy crisis caused by soaring global fuel prices, the response was not one of surprise: neither that new nuclear is at the top of the energy agenda nor that he is going beyond simple replacement of the current fleet that generates nearly a fifth of the nation's electricity.

But if Brown thinks the country has forgotten why it was once so freaked out by Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the backlash is about to be unleashed.

From rowdy Greenpeace demonstrations, to earnest calls for the application of the moral imperative from Friends of the Earth, to the kind of science from Britain's leading boffins that will scare the hell out of the electorate, the debate on why the country should not have nuclear starts now.

Operational

The current operator of the UK fleet, British Energy, will play a key part in new nuclear -probably under a new owner, which could possibly be EDF of France.

Yet British Energy's record of operating those power stations is deplorable. A multitude of unplanned outages and shutdowns has seen its eight stations running at barely 50% capacity, with its output as a proportion of all UK generation slipping ever further to a smaller fraction.

Its smooth-talking American boss, Bill Coley, says British Energy is the victim of years of underinvestment, yet he has also had to discipline staff for the sort of human errors that spook longterm investors.

And what of the future fleet? Both the competing state-of-the-art reactor technologies being trialled in France and Finland are being ridiculed by Green activists and development of the plants is being delayed because of " deficiencies" and "anomalies".

Financial

Few doubt the taxpayer or energy consumer will be picking up the bill in some way for a construction programme conservatively put at £20 billion.

That may be through direct taxpayer investment or Government underwriting of construction costs, or through the sort of subsidy system that sees windfarm operators being paid way over the spot price for output.

Or, as Friends of Earth reported in its recent "voodoo economics" attack on Brown's nuclear plans, the taxpayer is already funding the £73 billion - and rising - cost of cleaning up the existing legacy, and will have to pick up the tab on the cost of disposing or storing future radioactive waste.

Environmental

Just where will the waste go? Few experts believe Sellafield in Cumbria is the most suitable place to be the country's national radioactive dump, and that is before you even ask the locals. The answer, say the environmentalists, is to find a location for a £1 billion repository that has geological suitability and local community willingness.

No such match has yet been found and Greenpeace insists that no such repository has been knowingly constructed anywhere in the world.

The scientists on the Nuclear Consultation Working Group point to what they call "unresolved technical and ethical concerns" as the question arises over whether we should in any case be burying a radioactive timebomb for our great-grandchildren.

Safety

Nirvana for the nuclear industry is the next-generation technology - making the uranium fuel burn more fiercely for longer therefore needing less fuel, producing less waste.

Notwithstanding the need for the technology to provide the cooling capability to prevent meltdown, the scientists are arguing that the waste is more radioactive and more volatile, and there would need to be twice the amount of void in which it can be buried.

And, of course, there is also the argument that a brand new nuclear power station would be an ideal target for a terrorist attack.

Health

Has any scientific body satisfactorily or categorically decoupled the link between radiation and leukaemia or other cancers in infants? New Scientist magazine recently reported three studies, the most significant of which found a 117% increase in instances of leukaemia among young children living within five kilometres of Germany's 16 nuclear facilities between 1980 and 2003.

The nuclear industry has never paid a penny in compensation on health issues, which means the lawyers failed to prove their case. But could a government morally build new nuclear plant and not advise pregnant women to move away or avoid eating local produce for fear of radiation?

For Gordon Brown, a man with enough issues, the nuclear question is likely to be truly diabolical.