Category Archives: nuclear power

Nuclear dilemma

Posted on March 31, 2010 | 2 Comments

I am delighted that Horizon Nuclear Power, a joint venture of the German energy companies E.ON and RWE, has announced its intention to build a new nuclear power station at Wylfa, Anglesey.  The station will not only help keep the lights on, but will also provide high quality jobs in the very poorest area of the United Kingdom.

My delight is shared, it would appear, by Ynys Môn’s Welsh Assembly member, Mr Ieuan Wyn Jones, who is also Plaid Cymru leader (or, at least, one of them).  Here’s how the Daily Post reports his reaction:

Ieuan Wyn Jones said the news was very welcome given the job losses suffered on the island during the previous 19 months.

“I will be working with Coleg Menai and Bangor University to ensure that we have the skills in place to ensure local people are best placed to secure jobs at the plant,” he said.

“Coleg Menai has set up a fabrication and engineering unit to train people for the new job opportunities that come up. We must now work with the company as they develop their plans to ensure that we maximise the economic benefit the project will bring to Anglesey, in terms of the jobs that it will create in the building and operational phases.

“Local business must also benefit from contracts on the site and from supply chain opportunities, and this will need to be built into any consents.”

Great to see such unequivocal enthusiasm from one of Plaid’s leadership triumvirate.  However, as this blog has previously noted, Mr Jones surely has a bit of an ethical dilemma here.  He, after all, signed off Plaid’s European election manifesto, which stoutly declared:

we reaffirm our total opposition to the construction of any new nuclear power stations in Wales.

Couldn’t be any clearer really, could it?  No wriggle room whatever there.  They even put it in bold print.

So what, we must ask, is Mr Jones going to do?   Will he be prostrating himself  in the path of the bulldozers as they attempt to cut the first sod?  Or will he be resigning his leadership of Plaid in the Assembly?

If he does neither, he will effectively be saying that Plaid’s anti-nuclear policy, for which he is personally responsible, doesn’t apply in his own little corner of Wales.

And that wouldn’t be right, would it?

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Posted in Ieuan Wyn Jones, nuclear power, Plaid Cymru

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Dropping Albert in it

Posted on November 10, 2009 | 1 Comment

Rhodri Morgan has told BBC Wales that the Welsh Assembly Government “sees no need for new nuclear build in Wales”.

Given that the WAG has no input into large-scale electricity generation, which is not a devolved issue, one might have thought that Mr Morgan would feel constrained to keep his counsel, as he did over the Iraq war, if only out of consideration to his Labour colleague, Albert Owen, who will be defending Ynys Môn at the next general election, and for whom Wylfa B must be manna from heaven.

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Posted in Albert Owen, nuclear power, Rhodri Morgan

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Well done, Miliband – but rather late

Posted on November 9, 2009 | 1 Comment

The news that Wylfa has been identified by Energy Secretary Ed Miliband as the site of one of the new-generation nuclear power stations will be very well received on Anglesey; the only pity is that the Government effectively wasted ten years by refusing to endorse nuclear in its first energy white paper.

Still, there is more joy in heaven and all that…

Even the former CND member and civil nuclear power opponent, Peter Hain, has given the Wylfa announcement a fairly enthusiastic welcome:

“It is important for the energy security of our country that we get a new nuclear round of building started as soon as possible.

“A new nuclear power station at Wylfa will provide us with a stable energy mix which includes renewable generation such as wind and tidal, as well as our investment in clean coal technology.”

Problem is that the only one of those technologies that may be described as in any developed is wind power, which makes it the low hanging fruit of renewables; it is, however, less than 30 per cent efficient.  Tidal power is pitifully underdeveloped and clean coal is at little more than the experimental stage.

So nuclear is really the only means of reliable baseload generation that does not produce carbon emissions.  Ed Miliband’s announcement is therefore, I repeat, most welcome.

Despite being  ten years late.

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Posted in Ed Miliband, nuclear power, Peter Hain

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Nuclear reactors

Posted on October 25, 2009 | Leave a comment

There must be something about the sea air on Anglesey: it miraculously turns even the most hardened opponent of nuclear power into an enthusiast for a new generating station at Wylfa.

The Damascene conversion of Plaid Cymru’s Welsh Assembly leader, Ieuan Wyn Jones, is already well known.  Plaid Cymru is deeply anti-nuclear; its 2009 Euro manifesto confirmed its “total opposition to the construction of any new nuclear power stations in Wales” and its Assembly spokeswoman, Leanne Wood, declared in a plenary debate in September, 2007, that:

“Plaid Cymru, under all circumstances, will oppose any future proposal to locate a new nuclear power station at Wylfa”. 

Mr Jones was accordingly very much out of step with his own party when, in January 2008, he enthusiastically welcomed the Government’s announcement of its commitment to a new generation of nuclear power stations as “good news”. 

Mr Jones admittedly is the Assembly member for Anglesey, and Wylfa is a major employer there, but nevertheless it is rather odd to see a party leader putting his name to a manifesto policy which he manifestly considers to be a load of old cobblers.

Now Carwyn Jones has also experienced the Wylfa effect.

Mr Jones is one of three candidates for the leadership of the Labour group in the Welsh Assembly.  He visited Anglesey yesterday as part of his campaign tour and announced that, as the debate on nuclear energy had “shifted considerably”, he now believed that “nuclear power will form part of Wales’s low-carbon response to the serious challenges we face in the years to come”.

Mr Jones’s dramatic turnabout will, I am sure, please the local MP, Albert Owen, who is staunchly pro-nuclear and has put his name to Mr Jones’s nomination papers.

It may, however, be less pleasing to another of his sponsors, the Welsh environment minister, Jane Davidson.  Ms Davidson has always strongly adhered to the official Assembly Government line (to which Mr Jones is still nominally committed) of opposition to new nuclear development in Wales.  Only two months ago, she demanded a public inquiry into the Government’s proposals for Wylfa B “on the grounds of concern over the safety and security of the management of future nuclear waste”.

Ms Davidson may now be wondering whether she has backed the right man.  Perhaps she, too, should take a trip up to Anglesey and breathe the balmy Wylfa air.

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Posted in Albert Owen, Carwyn Jones, Ieuan Wyn Jones, Labour Party, Leanne Wood, nuclear power, Plaid Cymru, Welsh Assembly Government

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