And in the seventh month...
by Peter Bradwell
...there was nuclear power. Or, at least, talk about nuclear power.
The government's energy report has, to nobody's surprise, signalled that rebuilding Britain's nuclear power capacity will be necessary to keep our TVs burning and our Macbooks charged. And the Prime Minister confirmed what we all feared - that 'wishful thinking won't keep the lights on'. And there was me crossing my fingers...
But aside from the rights and wrongs (wrongs, wrongs) of investing in nuclear energy, there are the obvious challenges and problems the energy review raises for planning.
Committee-based recommendations such as these are the basis for decisions on massive infrastructural projects.
But with current prevailing models of consultation for such projects, is it any wonder that they get held up by long and complex appeal and consulatation processes? Is this the nature of the beast - or are there better ways of linking grand schemes and 'local' concerns through dialogue rather than feedback?
What relationship do people have to these comittees - just how democratically legitimate are they? Sustainability is supposed to be the raison d'etre for planning - but how much do the public feel part of that in relation to planning and infrastructure projects?
Legislating for a NIMBY backlash, through reform of the planning system to limit local efficacy in challenging these big projects, will, I'm guessing, only harden the resolve of those who have the inclination and resources to resist national planning directives.
To speed up and legitimise such infrastructure development, a lot of real work also needs to be done further upstream linking people's apirations and hopes about their own places with the broader implications of their everyday lives - before the brief for a report lands on the desks of the comittee, and certainly before pre-emptive public statements by those supposedly basing policy on the report's findings.
Paul Miller
David Miliband had a bit of a discussion on his blog about the benefits of decentralising power generation the other day. It made me wonder whether it wouldn't be better to encourage microgeneration rather than mid-scale renewables. I'm not up to speed on the performance of modern turbines but it might be easier to get 1000 x 1kW micro turbines built than one 1MW turbine, simply because of the nimbyism that the bigger ones attract.