Tony Blair is wrong to love nuclear energy (2025)

Towards the end of his time in office, Tony Blair came over all nuclear. A new generation of atomic energy plants, he told a CBI conference in 2006, would provide Britain with clean, carbon-free energy as well as boost national energy security. He didn’t last long enough in Downing Street to see it through, but this week he is banging the drum for nuclear energy again. The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has published a polemic, A New Nuclear Age, which dismisses fears over safety and cost to propose that Britain once more plunges headlong into new nuclear plants.

‘Public perception of the risk of nuclear power is not commensurate with the actual risk,’ it asserts. ‘The world is now paying a price for letting lingering concerns about safety and ideological opposition deter governments from harnessing a key solution to powering economies in a clean way.’ Had the industry not been killed off by irrational fears and carried on expanding at the rate it had been in the 1960s and 1970s, it goes on to claim, the world could have saved 28.9 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide since 1991 – 3.1 per cent of the total emitted in that period and equivalent to 903 coal-fired power stations.

How great it would be to love nuclear power. It is true that nuclear provides a reliable source of low-carbon energy that wind and solar cannot. It is hard to imagine the world getting anywhere close to net zero emissions without a hefty input from nuclear power.

Yet there is something rash about the Tony Blair Institute’s case for a massive expansion of the industry. True, nuclear energy generally has a very safe record – though to claim that the world has only seen ‘two major accidents (those at Chernobyl and Fukushima)’, as the TBI claims, does rather ignore Three Mile Island in 1979 and Windscale in 1957, both of which were critical public emergencies.

Blair misses the point about nuclear power and safety. It isn’t that nuclear accidents have ever killed large numbers of people. The predictions at the time that Chernobyl would go on to kill tens of thousands of people were magnitudes out: the UN’s official death toll – all deaths attributed to the accident to date, including effects of radiation decades later – stands at just 50. The problem with nuclear is more the economic cost of a serious accident. After Chernobyl, an exclusion zone with a 30 km radius was imposed – still mostly uninhabited today. After Fukushima, a 20 km radius exclusion zone was imposed, putting 600 square km out of bounds – since reduced to 370 km. It required 165,000 people to be evacuated.

Project those zones around Hinkley nuclear power station and a Fukushima-level accident would require the evacuation of Bridgwater, Taunton and much of Exmoor. For a Chernobyl-scale accident you can add on the centre of Cardiff. There would be no more Glastonbury, either. Maybe traffic might still be allowed to transit along the M5, so long as motorists didn’t linger; otherwise the South West would lose its main road connection. Such would be the economic devastation that even a once-in-a-century event on this scale becomes intolerable.

Nuclear power stations have improved a lot over the decades – and western designs were never as dangerous as Soviet ones. Even so, Japan still suffered a devastating accident. Moreover, with safety improvements have come extra layers of cost. The strike price (long-term guaranteed price) offered to the developers of Hinkley C – £92.50/MWh at 2012 prices, rising with inflation – was twice the market price for electricity at the time.

If we are going to have a new nuclear age, the safety aspects will very much still have to be addressed. Small nuclear reactors (SMRs) of around one-tenth the output of Hinkley could have a big role to play here, as the consequences of a serious accident would be much reduced. But the idea that SMRs could bring down the cost of nuclear energy looks a long way from being realised. Tony Blair is of a type: a non-scientist whose messianic belief in whatever science or technology he has discovered tends to run ahead of the reality. With Japan and also now Germany turning their backs on nuclear power, and a lack of enthusiasm from many other countries, a new nuclear age looks a long way away.