New Nuclear – Unaffordable, Undesirable and Unachievable
by Andrew Blowers and Stephen Thomas
In 2022 Boris Johnson set a target of 24GW (eight more Hinkley Point Cs) of new nuclear capacity to be running by 2050. To achieve this, he announced the creation of Great British Nuclear with a mission of ‘helping projects through every stage of the development process and developing a resilient pipeline of new builds.’ More than two years after its announcement Great British Nuclear has no permanent executive, no permanent staff and no premises. While not explicitly endorsing the 24GW, the new Labour Government proclaimed that a scale expansion of nuclear ‘will play an important role in helping the UK achieve energy security and clean power’. But, neither government has recognised the near impossibility of achieving the Great British Nuclear expansion. It is a project bound to fail.
No amount of political commitment can overcome the lack of investors, the absence of credible builders or reliable technologies let alone secure regulatory approval. In an era of climate change there will be few suitable sites to host new nuclear power stations and radioactive waste stores for indefinite timescales on vulnerable sites will be scattered across the country. There are the new fears that nuclear foments, the danger of accidents, cyber-attacks, terrorism and war vividly brought into present focus by threatened nuclear plants in Ukraine (Zaporizhzhia) and Russia (Kursk).
New nuclear is unaffordable especially at a time of severe fiscal constraint required by the £22bn ‘black hole’ in the country’s finances. Nuclear energy has consistently proved to be a bottomless pit with ever rising costs and lengthening delays. Hinkley Point C has doubled in cost and will be at least 12 years late when it begins operating. Its successor, Sizewell C has already cost the Treasury £2.5b.with a further subsidy of £5.5bn announced just to get the project to a Final Investment Decision (FID) forecast for this year, although a FID has been said to be imminent for three years. To prevent the project collapsing, the UK Government has chosen to contribute about 95% of the cost of getting Sizewell C to FID. Government began to order components for Sizewell C more than a year ago, which, if it does not go ahead, would be taxpayer money lost. Under the financing model proposed, Regulated Asset Base (RAB), consumers will start paying for the plant from the day of FID, long before they receive any power from the plant. The risk of cost escalation during construction will fall on them. For Hinkley Point C, EDF took this risk and has, as a result, had to write off €12.9bn of its investment. This subsidy to Sizewell C would place an immediate extra burden on citizens facing higher energy prices and loss of winter fuel payments – the subsidies for Sizewell C would have paid for six years of winter fuel payments.
Lack of investors means that large nuclear reactors beyond Sizewell C are unlikely, so attention has turned to Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) as the latest episode in the Great British Nuclear Fantasy. Portrayed as cheaper, quicker to build and safer they are simply old wine in newish bottles. None has been ordered, built, operated or completed comprehensive safety evaluation anywhere in the world so the claims are just pious hopes. Great British Nuclear’s first task was to run a competition to identify the two best SMR designs for deployment by the mid-2030s. So, even if they were economic and reliable, follow-on plants would only come on-line well after 2040 far too late to make a significant contribution to achieving net zero. Meanwhile, money is being sunk into the competition and around £20bn of taxpayer money will be needed to bring them to development and pay for a handful of reactors. Investment on such a scale in designs that are untried, untested and will materialise too late is foolish. The next stage should have taken six months and been completed in Spring 2024, but it is running about nine months late.
We consider it reasonable to conclude that any major expansion of civil nuclear power in the UK beyond that already committed is neither desirable nor achievable.
The nuclear industry would have us believe that new nuclear is essential if climate change is to be combated effectively. This highly suspect assertion is meant to divert attention away from the long-standing concerns about nuclear power: how to ensure severe accidents cannot happen; what to do with the waste; how to avoid proliferation of weapons material.
Announcements of large programmes of nuclear reactors are often made not just in Britain. They either fail completely or result in a few white elephant reactors. This will happen with the Johnson programme. The cost will be the wasted decade or more finding out the project is not feasible or desirable and the financial and human resources wasted on nuclear when they could be better deployed on alternatives that will be cheaper, quicker and more reliable.
Biographical notes:
Andrew Blowers OBE, Emeritus Professor of Social Sciences, Open University. Former member of Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM) and Radioactive Waste Management Advisory Committee(RWMAC); author The Legacy of Nuclear Power.
Stephen Thomas, Emeritus Professor of Energy Policy, University of Greenwich. Editor-in-Chief of the journal Energy Policy.