Last week, Claire Coutinho published the Government’s “nuclear roadmap”. Sticking with Boris Johnson’s target of having a quarter of our electricity from nuclear by 2050, this attempts to explain how we achieve the quadrupling of nuclear capacity required to achieve the necessary 24 gigawatts (GW).
Rishi Sunak calls nuclear the “perfect antidote to the energy challenges facing Britain”. He isn’t wrong. Last February he created the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero; more nuclear power stations would be crucial in achieving both (whatever one thinks of the latter target). As Coutinho puts it, nuclear power is “one of the most reliable, low-carbon sources of energy around” and can mean we are “never again…held to ransom over energy” by hostile actors.
Getting more energy from the atom is good for Johnny Polar Bear and bad for Vladimir Putin. Sounds perfect. But the Government’s nuclear ambitions face an immediate stumbling block. At present, our nuclear capacity stands at 5.9GW, produced by five power stations. These are all owned by EDF, the French state energy group. Four of those plants – producing 4.7GW – are set to close in 2028.
EDF has floated keeping them open for longer. Yet even that would require Britain to massively ramp up its nuclear capacity in the next three decades to for us to have any hope of achieving the Government’s aim to come over a bit Doctor Manhatten. Following this, Coutinho has established an ambition to invest in new nuclear capacity of between 3GW and 7GW every five years from 2030 to 2044.
Work is already in progress. Hinkley Point C in Somerset is under construction. Sizewall C is planned for Suffolk, with a final investment decision due to be made by the end of this year. The Government is considering approving the construction of a third similarly sized power station. Additionally, ministers want to build a fleet of “small modular reactors” alongside these larger plants.
Consider SMRs the Stegosaurus to Hinkley’s Diplodocus. Although they produce up to 70 per cent less power than larger plants, SMRs should be cheaper and easier to build. They could be built on a much greater number of sites, and not necessarily by the coast. That’s good news since we’d need a lo of them. Even if a larger plant was built on each of the eight sites where development is now permitted, they would only produce 14GW of the required 24.
One says should, could, and would, since SMR technology is in development and has yet to be deployed commercially. Johnson’s tongue-in-cheek vision of an SMR in “every Labour seat” remains as much of a fantasy as any of his mooted grands projets. Putting so much faith in SMRs to deliver our nuclear dreams is wishful thinking by Coutinho. But that is true of her whole “roadmap” and the ambitions behind them.
As Sam Dumitriu points out, when Hinkley opens in 2028, it will not only be the first nuclear power station built in Britain for over three decades, but the second most expensive nuclear power station built in history on a pound-per-megawatt basis. Having been due to open in the early 2020s, it is now expected to cost £32 billion. Some expect its construction could be further delayed into the 2030s.
This bodes poorly for Coutinho’s touted “nuclear awakening”. Britain Remade suggests we now rank 15th out of 16 countries by construction cost per megawatt-hour of generating capacity. The causes are depressingly familiar: heavy-handed regulation, withered capacities, and political indifference.
Capital costs make up around 60 per cent of nuclear’s levelised cost of energy. The average has been estimated at $6041-per-kilowatt – over 50 per cent more than coal and 500 more than gas. Factoring in that building a nuclear power station in Britain usually takes around 13 years, and it becomes obvious why investing in nuclear remains unattractive. Financing Hinkley involved the Government agreeing to a wholly uncompetitive deal.
Dumitriu has highlighted – in an excellent Substack post – how, before even applying for planning permission for a nuclear power station, one must complete a Generic Design Assessment, which enables the Office for Nuclear Regulation and Environment Agency to inspect the safety and environmental consequences of your design. This takes four years. Countiho aims to halve that.
I’ve seen Chernobyl. Designing and approving a nuclear power station should be far from easy. But it shouldn’t be the case that building Hinkley Point C is five times more expensive than it would be in South Korea. Dumitru urges Coutinho to copy Jeremy Hunt’s new scheme for automatically approving medicines previously approved in the United States or EU, with tweaks for UK conditions. Jump on the Seoul train!
Yet this won’t eliminate the many hurdles to getting new nuclear power stations built. Public support for new nuclear power stations has increased in recent years. Levels of opposition have fallen from 27 per cent to 12 per cent since 2012, with approval rising from 38 per cent to 42 per cent. But being theoretically in favour of nuclear power could rapidly change once voters find a reactor cropping up in their vicinity.
The Government hopes an overhaul of planning rules could allow SMRs to be approved in a variety of locations, especially brownfield sites, away from areas with population densities of more than 5,000 people per square kilometre. However, there is still plenty of opportunity for applications to be denied based on natural beauty, ecology, cultural heritage, size, or flood risk. To combat NIMBYism, we would need to stuff a few mouths with gold.
Britain’s nuclear ambitions are also hampered by our current reliance on EDF. From leading the world in nuclear technology in the 1950s, our long lag since last constructing a plant has seen a loss of know-how, leaving us reliant on EDF for larger plants. Not only has this left us having signed an expensive deal for Hinkley, but it has entrusted our energy security to a company with a record of costly delays.
This is of a piece with our long tradition of nuclear short-sightedness. As Peter Franklin has pointed out, Johnson and Sunak follow Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher, and Tony Blair in making grand pronouncements of a fleet of new British nuclear reactors. Little has good came of any of them. Amidst some substantial competition, we can count Hinkley as one of Blair’s most ignominious legacies.
We can expect Coutinho’s proposals to end up on a similar scrapheap. Labour say they are keen on more nuclear. But they will face the same problems of regulation, construction costs, and political volatility. It might take only another Fukushima for the public to go all German on our nuclear future.
The solution to our energy crisis is clear: an “all of the above” campaign based on nuclear, renewables, and fracking, to turn us from an energy importer to an energy exporter as soon as possible. With Labour’s £28 billion of borrowing for green investment receding ever further into the distance, this remains a wholly unlikely prospect.
Ramping up nuclear is the obvious route to our energy security and Net Zero dilemmas. But that doesn’t mean it is ever going to happen.