Member-only story
Safeguarding our energy independence
On 7th November Prime Minister Rishi Sunak set out his plans to build a globally connected and innovative economy. Top of the list: ‘Safeguarding our energy independence’.
Safeguarding our energy independence is a worthy aim, though agreements to buy energy from other countries during periods of exceptional demand might be cheaper than keeping enough backup of our own.
On 20th November he tweeted a little more detail:
- New nuclear power stations
- Backing North Sea oil & gas
- Investing in renewables
It looks like he has a very strange idea of what safeguarding our energy independence means.
New nuclear power stations
As I explained in a previous article, nuclear is a very bad idea.
For one thing, we’d be concentrating a lot of energy generation in a very small area, which would be vulnerable to enemy attack as in Zaporizhzhia, to natural disaster as at Fukushima (expensive!) or to human error as at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. Britain’s a small country. A major accident here would have a huge impact on the GDP (which is what Tories care about, apparently).
Also, nuclear projects have a habit of having major time and cost overruns…