Vite, vite, Johnny French. We can’t wait much longer for a nuclear roast turkey

When the nuclear power station at Chernobyl blew up, everyone ran about, waving their arms in the air and saying millions would die from the radioactive fallout. Farmers in Wales said their sheep had turned green and many had grown a new head. Ukraine, said the experts, would be a desert until the end of time.

Well, I went to Chernobyl last year and spent a day mooching about in the nearby city of Pripyat. The trees were full of fruit. The woods echoed to the sound of wolf cubs playing joyfully in the sunshine. And so far I have grown no warts.

It’s a similar story in Fukushima. A tsunami caused what’s described as a ‘level 7 event’ and, once again, the experts were to be seen on television, wailing and gnashing their teeth and explaining how everyone in Japan would die a horrible death within weeks. And yet, so far, the number of people who’ve died from radiation exposure is, er, nought.

This is the problem with the debate on nuclear power. Every scrap of information we receive comes from the mongers of doom. We read phrases such as ‘level 7 event’ and we’re scared, even though we don’t know what level 7 actually is. Nor do we know how nuclear power works.

We think there is some kind of rod made possibly from uranium. Or maybe plutonium and that it needs to be cooled somehow. It’s hard to be sure and there’s no point consulting the internet for more information because that has been hijacked by the disciples of Monsignor Bruce Kent.

I’m not a disciple of God Luddite. I get my opinions from a well of something called reason and it goes like this: we need to generate electricity and we can’t use coal and gas because we can chip and chisel and frack as much as we like but one day both will run out. And we can’t rely on new-age alternatives such as sunshine or wind because neither can produce anything like what we need. Which means if we want to drive electric cars and charge our phones and make tea, we must go nuclear. There is no alternative.

But, oh my God, there simply has to be an alternative to the way we go about delivering it …

Britain was the first country in the world to open a nuclear power station, but then we adopted the same philosophy that we saw with the Mini and the Land Rover and Concorde and the red phone box. We invent something … and then never develop it.

In 2006, however, Tony Blair decided to put that right. He declared nuclear power was ‘back on the agenda with a vengeance’. But there was a problem. There were no nuclear physicists in Britain. Not one.

So it was announced we were getting into bed with the French, who a year later said the people of Britain would be cooking their Christmas turkeys using lemon-fresh nuclear power by 2017.

In 2008 all was going well. Our French friends announced there would be four new plants in Britain, all of which would use the European pressurized reactor system. But then in 2010 disaster struck.

Engineers scouring one of the sites, at Hinkley Point, in Somerset, found a colony of badgers. They applied to Natural England for permission to move them and, having submitted detailed plans of how this might be done, the licence was granted. But that wasn’t good enough for a bunch of women who, in their heads, were still chained to the fence at Greenham Common. ‘This is how they’ll treat people,’ they wailed. ‘You’ll be tranquillized in the night and put in vans.’

So much time and effort was put into Badgergate that no one noticed another problem. We had the design for a new reactor. We had a badger-free site. We had government approval. But then someone looked in the bank and, uh-oh, there was no money to build anything.

While everyone sat around wondering what on earth they were going to do, the wave hit Fukushima and everything was halted while the design was analysed to make sure it was safe. Which, since Fukushima was a totally different design, is a bit like halting the production of Bedford vans because a Boeing 747 has crashed.

It was May 2011 before anyone realized the Bedford van is nothing like a Boeing 747 and there will never be a tsunami in Somerset. Which meant everyone could go back to scratching their heads about money.

Happily, Chris Huhne, then Energy Secretary, forgot that he’d once said the government must stop putting time, effort and subsidies into nuclear energy and decided to use cash earmarked for green projects to, er, subsidize the new power plants. Maybe his mind was on other things …

But whatever, with the subsidies in place, the French applied for planning permission. And as anyone who’s tried to build a conservatory knows, this is never easy. Indeed, owing to the rules on newts, bats and badgers, their application ran to 55,000 pages.

It was such a complex job that it was March 2013 before permission was granted. By which time the costs had run amok and more money was needed. Which meant that six months later the government agreed to pay Johnny French £92.50 for every megawatt-hour of power – twice what electricity normally cost at that time. And we’d be paying it for the next thirty-five years.

And it still wasn’t enough. By May last year all they’d built was a new roundabout. And now here we are, just twenty-five months away from when we were supposed to be cooking our turkeys with nuclear power, and still nothing is finalized. Even though the Chinese are now involved, the French are still doing that shruggy thing after they’ve been asked an awkward question such as ‘When?’

I’m not surprised, really, because the actual answer is that we can’t afford nuclear power. And we can’t afford not to have it either.

So here we are. It’s nearly ten years since Mr Blair said nuclear power was back with a vengeance and all we have to show for it is a new roundabout and a family of rather confused badgers.

8 November 2015