In this week’s Gossage Gossip, Mr Gossage discusses the fallacy that the Government perpetuates around nuclear power being needed to provide a ‘baseload’.
The Government will need to come up with a new justification for its fixation upon nuclear power. Its previous justification, which it shared in the 2022 British Energy Security Strategy, was that “We can only secure a big enough baseload of reliable power for our island by drawing on nuclear.” This was later reiterated in its Powering Up Britain manifesto issued just this March, “Nuclear is the critical baseload of the future energy system.”
All this reliance upon the “baseload” concept prompted the indefatigable Green MP, Brighton’s Caroline Lucas, to inquire from the Energy Minister Graham Stuart, “if he will make an estimate of the amount of baseload electricity generation that is required by the UK each day; and if he will place a copy of these calculations in the House of Commons Library.”
The response from Stuart was honest, if surprising. He admitted, “Although some power plants are referred to as baseload generators, there is no formal definition of this term. The Department also does not place requirements on generation from particular technologies. As such, it is not possible to provide this information.”
So, at last the Government is now conceding that baseload is an entirely undefined and unidentifiable electricity concept. And that means that the Government is acknowledging that this latest fig leaf justification for wasting so much money on new nukes as quoted in my first paragraph, is utterly specious. We should never hear it employed again.