THE Government made two announcements this week concerning their nuclear power ambitions.
- Rolls-Royce have finally been selected to build small nuclear reactors (SMRs) in the UK.
- The Government is to invest £14.2billion in the Sizewell C nuclear project in Suffolk.
Ed Miliband naturally presents all this as the best thing since sliced bread – 13,000 jobs, ‘clean’ power for 9million homes, energy security. If it was so good, of course, we would immediately halt all wind farm projects as they will soon be redundant.
Look behind the facade, and you will find a rather different story!
Let’s start with Sizewell C. This latest tranche of taxpayer money takes the UK Government stake to £22billion, amounting to 84 per cent of the total scheme funding. The other 16 per cent is held by EDF, the French state-owned energy company, which will still be in total control of the project.
Sizewell C, together with the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant which is due to open in the early 2030s, will produce more electricity than all the thousands of offshore wind turbines littering our coasts put together. And unlike wind, nuclear power will be available 24/7, avoiding the need for building costly standby capacity.
But Hinkley C, another EDF construction in Somerset, has proved to be a bottomless pit where money is concerned, and is now several years behind schedule, mirroring similar EDF projects in France.
Experts expect Sizewell C to end up costing at least £40billion, raising the question of who will pay the extra £10billion or so likely to be needed above the financing already in place. EDF quite simply do not have the capital to contribute any more, which is why China were originally going to fund 20 per cent of the capital cost. Due to security concerns, they were bought out by the British Government in 2022.
It therefore seems inevitable that British taxpayers will be on the hook for all future overspends and delays, even though they will be the responsibility of EDF. Tails you win!
As for timescales, Hinkley C is expected to begin operations some 15 years after contracts were signed, five years later than planned. It is unlikely then that the new Sizewell reactor will be ready until well into the 2040s, and will therefore make no contribution at all to the blackouts coming our way in the near future.
Independent energy expert Kathryn Porter hit the nail on the head, commenting: ‘It’s hard to imagine a “golden age” of nuclear power with EDF’s outdated and troubled reactor design. EDF in France is already looking to the next generation – building another of these older versions is a retrograde step. It’s also highly unlikely that Sizewell C would be built faster than Hinkley given the lengthening of supply chains.’
The reality is that we should have been pushing ahead with building nuclear power stations decades ago. Ed Miliband has the nerve to complain about decades of ‘dither and delay’. But it was the Labour government of Blair and Brown which failed to build on Thatcher’s bold decision to give the go-ahead to the Sizewell B plant, which began generating in 1995.
During the Blair/Brown era, of which Miliband was a key member, no new projects were started and no contracts were signed, largely for ideological reasons. It was left to Cameron and May finally to address matters by making a start with Hinkley C.
If Blair had pushed on with Thatcher’s nuclear programme instead of selling off our nuclear industry, we could now have a fleet of power stations producing electricity at a fraction of the cost we are now committed to paying the French. We could also have avoided the need to waste billions on subsidising inefficient renewable energy, the cost of which is now approaching a hundred billion.
Instead we have a choice of the frying pan or the fire. The current contract price for Hinkley Point is £127/MWh, but renewable energy is no cheaper when the costs of intermittency are accounted for.
By contrast, gas power is half the price.
Rolls-Royce’s £2.5billion present from you
AS I mentioned above, Rolls-Royce has been selected as preferred bidder to build small modular reactors, SMRs. These in essence are scaled-up versions of the nuclear reactors on board submarines.
The Government is handing over £2.5billion of taxpayers’ money to help fund the scheme. No detail has been given of how this money will be allocated or what guarantees taxpayers have that the money won’t disappear down another black hole.
They say these SMRs will be ready by the mid-2030s and will power 3million homes. But as usual, this is a con as they ignore the two thirds of electricity which is for non-domestic use – industry, commerce, public sector and transport.
In reality the planned SMRs will generate only 3 per cent of the nation’s power, barely making a dent. Their total output will be no more than that of a single modern gas power station.
Including taxpayer largesse, they are expected to cost around £10billion in all. For that sort of money, we could build a fleet of modern CCGT gas power stations, with enough capacity to supply a quarter of the country’s electricity. Moreover, they could all be up and running within three or four years.
Instead we are gambling billions on a project that will take at least a decade to build and may not even work at all.
