Tonight:
4°c
Time was when British Energy used to published a monthly output statement. To be fair, the regular updates were truly as dull as listening to the Scottish Second Division football results...Hunterston 0.81 terawatts, Torness 0.86...
But at least wattage watchers - and indeed City investors - had key data on how the nation's nuclear generating company was faring.
This publication of monthly nuclear production ended in the autumn of 2004. A few weeks later, the company was formally rescued from bankruptcy by a massive debt-for-equity swap and shares in New British Energy were listed on the stock market.
The privatised company - British Energy was the final sell-off of the nation's crown jewels by the last Conservative regime - had effectively gone bust in 2003 though kept out of insolvency by a New Labour bailout.
British Energy was insolvent for a number of reasons. It had ramped up its borrowing to pay Sids and the City spectacular dividends, rather than invest in the upkeep of its eight strong nuclear fleet or make provision for the eventual decommissioning of that plant.
It had by 2003 also found it could not make a penny profit from generating electricity. The price of power had collapsed after the breaking of the old Electricity Pool cartel and the introduction of competition into the market. The fixed cost of producing nuclear power was found to be more expensive than the price British Energy could sell it for.
It had, as is now universally accepted, been poorly run.
But while the cycle of energy markets exposed Old British Energy's financial precariousness, it was the subsequent disappearance under New British Energy of regular output data that told a far darker, far more fundamental story: British Energy and its fleet of our nuclear power stations were and are in chronic decline. The soaring electricity price in recent years, which has led to £1000-a-year household bills, masked that deteriorating operational performance. But the regular shutdown of plant because of various but serious safety reasons showed a company in trouble: if it had still been producing monthly output data, it would at one stage have read Hunterston 0, Hinkley Point 0, Heysham 0, Hartlepool 0.
Yet the depths of British Energy's startling decline can only now be unveiled with a search through the official Energy Statistics for 2008.
Deep within those stats, it is revealed nuclear power provided just 12.5% of the nation's electricity supplied. That compares with about 20% as recently as 2005 and more than a quarter in 1998. In 1997 - the year British Energy was privatised - nuclear power accounted for 26.7% of the electricity supplied in the UK. In short, atomic output has halved in a dozen years, giving a whole new meaning to a nuclear half life.
* Nuclear power clearly matters. With the decline of dirty coal and the failure to emerge of clean renewables, nuclear more and more becomes the UK's swing fuel, the energy source that over the next decade pending the construction of new power stations - gas or nuclear - is the difference between the lights staying on or going out.
Now under the mechanisms of British Energy's takeover by EDF, monthly output data are becoming available again.
The terms of EDF's £12 billion acquisition of British Energy gave investors 774p in cash or 700p in cash plus one Nuclear Power Note (NPN). The NPN is basically a bet on the future operating performance of the British Energy power stations: if the power stations fail to hit output targets, the NPN is worthless; if they completely outperform, the NPNcould be worth as much as 575p over a 10-year period.
That arrangement means EDF has committed to quietly keeping investors regularly updated on output.
The sale of British Energy to EDF has been a master stroke by Gordon Brown.
He has headed a Government that has once more sold off the nation's crown jewels - and with little outraged comment - to the French.
He has ensured the Treasury has cashed in a £4 billion windfall for the sale of its "shadow stake" in British Energy taken as a condition of the 2003 bail out.
And for the first time in more than four years, we can monitor how well or poorly our nuclear plants are doing.
Labour's energy policy obfuscation has meant a belated focus on construction of new nuclear power stations though they will not be operational until 2018 at the earliest. For the next 10 years, we should all hope the past decade of nuclear decline is reversed.
