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Britain’s nuclear industry has launched a campaign to protect its future.
Earlier this month Nuclear Electric announced that it had ‘beaten all records
for electricity production’.

The government has shown little enthusiasm for nuclear power, but last
week the energy minister, John Wakeham, joined the rehabilitation effort.
During a visit to Nuclear Electric’s Heysham reactors in Lancashire, he
said: ‘It is my belief that circumstances are now increasingly combining
to create new opportunities for the nuclear power industry.’ He went on
to say that Nuclear Electric ‘is making an enormous effort to get nuclear
energy back on course’.

This flurry of public activity comes after the nuclear industry set
up its own internal review of the case for nuclear power. Nuclear Electric,
Scottish Nuclear, the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and British Nuclear
Fuels (BNFL) have set up a series of study groups to persuade the government
that the industry is no lame duck.

The Nuclear Utilities Chairman’s Group (NUCG), made up of the heads
of the four organisations, has set up groups to review four key subjects.
The chief executive of the UKAEA, Brian Eyre, is leading the study on the
economics of nuclear power. Scottish Nuclear is responsible for the review
of waste management and decommissioning. BNFL is investigating the issues
surrounding health, safety and the environment. John Collier, chief executive
of Nuclear Electric, is leading the investigation into research and development.

Each working group will prepare its case for review by a fifth working
party, the Public Presentation Group, chaired by Christopher Harding, chairman
of BNFL. Harding says that the overall review is still in the early stages.
The goal is to agree a case for presentation in time for the government’s
own review of Britain’s nuclear programme in 1994.

Harding says: ‘We have to be in a position for the industry to convince
the government that further public funding of nuclear power is justified.’
He maintains that the nuclear case took a hammering during the negotiations
that led to the privatisation of the electricity industry in Britain. In
the run-up to the sell off of the state-owned electricity companies, the
companies worked hard to convince the government that it could not expect
a high price for the nuclear element of the package.

The Central Electricity Generating Board and other organisations that
were negotiating the terms of the privatisation argued that the City would
not support a privatisation package that included large unknown costs for
the decommissioning of nuclear installations when they reached the end of
their useful life. In effect, the industry wanted the government to throw
in nuclear power at a knock-down price and to bear the costs of decommissioning.

The industry was so successful in talking up the costs of nuclear power
– and talking down its value – that the government withdrew this component
from the privatisation package. The City, persuaded by the industry’s arguments,
effectively rendered the privatisation impossible with nuclear energy as
a part of the sell off. Rather than abandon the whole exercise, the government
opted to keep nuclear power in public ownership and to privatise the rest
of the industry.

The haggling in the run-up to privatisation left nuclear power with
a severe image problem. This prompted the NUCG to initiate its review. The
aim is to make ‘a good, valid, economic argument’ for nuclear power, says
Harding. ‘The industry has got to have a convincing case,’ he says, ‘and
it has to be based on genuine operating experience and not on theoretical
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