Henry Higgins is a Conservative councillor for Hillingdon and founder of Blackridge Planning Insight.
Here’s the story we keep telling ourselves: the British public doesn’t trust nuclear power, so government has to move cautiously.
It’s not true, and it hasn’t been true for years.
A YouGov poll for the Nuclear Industry Association in August 2026 found 53 per cent of the public support building new nuclear power stations, against just 22 per cent opposed, a clear majority, more than double the opposition. The public isn’t the obstacle. It hasn’t been for a long time.
So who is afraid?
The planning system is. Not of nuclear power itself, but of moving fast on it, because every regulator, every planning committee and every minister who signs off a nuclear scheme knows that if anything goes wrong, they’ll be the one blamed for the risk they took, and nobody will ever thank them for the delay they avoided. That fear of judgment is what actually drives the caution, not public opinion. And it’s why Britain, a country that once led the world in civil nuclear power, now takes over a decade and tens of billions of pounds to build a single station.
What fear costs: Hinkley Point C
Hinkley Point C is the clearest evidence of what institutional caution actually produces. Agreed in 2016 at £18 billion, due online in 2025. It is now expected to cost upwards of £48 billion and start generating no earlier than 2030, meaning the price has very roughly tripled. It’s five years late, and it’s the first EPR (European Pressurised Reactor) design Britain has ever built, meaning every problem gets solved for the first time, at full cost, on the client’s bill. EDF’s own managing director has said that lessons learned building the first Hinkley reactor should improve performance by 20 to 30 per cent on the second, identical one. That single admission tells you almost everything wrong with how Britain builds nuclear power stations. We know repetition works, but we still keep building one-offs.
Sizewell C, approved to use a near-identical design to Hinkley, should have been the moment Britain started acting like it actually believed in repetition. Instead every site continues to go through its own full-length regulatory and consenting cycle, as if the design were being seen for the first time.
What confidence looks like: France and Korea
Contrast that with what a country looks like when it decides fear isn’t a strategy. France’s Messmer Plan, launched in 1974 after the oil crisis, standardised a single reactor design and built it in fleets — first plants online in six years, fifty-plus reactors built by the late 1980s, taking France from a standing start to roughly 70 per cent of its electricity from nuclear within a generation. It wasn’t cheap by the end, and later plants did cost more than early ones. But the core lesson holds: pick a design once, build it many times, and let the twentieth reactor benefit from everything learned on the first.
South Korea did the same with its APR1400 design, certified once by its own regulator, then repeated across Shin Kori, Shin Hanul and Saeul, and exported wholesale to four working units at Barakah in the UAE. Neither country treated every new station as a fresh argument about whether the technology could be trusted. They settled that question once, properly, and then got on with building.
The good news: Britain has already started admitting this
To the current government’s credit, the machinery for fixing this is now moving. The Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce found last year that Britain’s system is “unnecessarily slow, inefficient and costly,” with excessive duplication between regulators and little recognition of work already done by trusted counterparts abroad. This May, the Office for Nuclear Regulation responded. It set a new ambition: reactor design assessment in two years, not the current process’s much longer timeline. It also published a policy to draw on the judgements of trusted international regulators, rather than starting every review from zero.
That is exactly the right instinct. The mistake would be to treat it as a technocratic tidy-up instead of what it actually is: an admission that the caution was never really about safety, it was about process for its own sake.
What should happen next
Say the quiet part out loud. Ministers should stop hiding nuclear policy behind claims of public wariness that the polling doesn’t support. Own the ambition. The country wants this built.
That ambition now has an official number attached to it. The party’s new energy policy, set out this August by the Shadow Energy Secretary, commits to more than tripling UK nuclear capacity to 20GW by 2050, funded through the regulated asset base model already being used to de-risk Sizewell C. That’s the right target, and it’s a genuinely bold one. The test now is whether the regulatory reform keeps pace with the ambition — a 20GW commitment is worth nothing if every station on the way there still has to clear the same decade-long process Hinkley did.
Finish what the Taskforce started. Take the two-year assessment target and the international-recognition policy from proposal to statutory guarantee, with a genuine deadline that can’t drift the way Hinkley’s timeline has.
Build in fleets, not one-offs. Commit publicly to repeating proven designs, Sizewell C’s near-identical twin to Hinkley should be the first of many, not a one-time coincidence, and let the planning and consenting burden shrink with every repeat, the way costs already do on site.
Treat fast, safe nuclear as a growth story, not a risk to be managed. France undercuts the rest of Europe on electricity prices because it made this bet fifty years ago. Korea now exports the reactors other countries can’t build themselves. Britain invented civil nuclear power. There’s no reason it should now be the country still afraid to build it.
The public settled this argument a while ago. It’s time the system that’s supposed to serve them caught up.
Henry Higgins is a Conservative councillor for Hillingdon and founder of Blackridge Planning Insight.
Here’s the story we keep telling ourselves: the British public doesn’t trust nuclear power, so government has to move cautiously.
It’s not true, and it hasn’t been true for years.
A YouGov poll for the Nuclear Industry Association in August 2026 found 53 per cent of the public support building new nuclear power stations, against just 22 per cent opposed, a clear majority, more than double the opposition. The public isn’t the obstacle. It hasn’t been for a long time.
So who is afraid?
The planning system is. Not of nuclear power itself, but of moving fast on it, because every regulator, every planning committee and every minister who signs off a nuclear scheme knows that if anything goes wrong, they’ll be the one blamed for the risk they took, and nobody will ever thank them for the delay they avoided. That fear of judgment is what actually drives the caution, not public opinion. And it’s why Britain, a country that once led the world in civil nuclear power, now takes over a decade and tens of billions of pounds to build a single station.
What fear costs: Hinkley Point C
Hinkley Point C is the clearest evidence of what institutional caution actually produces. Agreed in 2016 at £18 billion, due online in 2025. It is now expected to cost upwards of £48 billion and start generating no earlier than 2030, meaning the price has very roughly tripled. It’s five years late, and it’s the first EPR (European Pressurised Reactor) design Britain has ever built, meaning every problem gets solved for the first time, at full cost, on the client’s bill. EDF’s own managing director has said that lessons learned building the first Hinkley reactor should improve performance by 20 to 30 per cent on the second, identical one. That single admission tells you almost everything wrong with how Britain builds nuclear power stations. We know repetition works, but we still keep building one-offs.
Sizewell C, approved to use a near-identical design to Hinkley, should have been the moment Britain started acting like it actually believed in repetition. Instead every site continues to go through its own full-length regulatory and consenting cycle, as if the design were being seen for the first time.
What confidence looks like: France and Korea
Contrast that with what a country looks like when it decides fear isn’t a strategy. France’s Messmer Plan, launched in 1974 after the oil crisis, standardised a single reactor design and built it in fleets — first plants online in six years, fifty-plus reactors built by the late 1980s, taking France from a standing start to roughly 70 per cent of its electricity from nuclear within a generation. It wasn’t cheap by the end, and later plants did cost more than early ones. But the core lesson holds: pick a design once, build it many times, and let the twentieth reactor benefit from everything learned on the first.
South Korea did the same with its APR1400 design, certified once by its own regulator, then repeated across Shin Kori, Shin Hanul and Saeul, and exported wholesale to four working units at Barakah in the UAE. Neither country treated every new station as a fresh argument about whether the technology could be trusted. They settled that question once, properly, and then got on with building.
The good news: Britain has already started admitting this
To the current government’s credit, the machinery for fixing this is now moving. The Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce found last year that Britain’s system is “unnecessarily slow, inefficient and costly,” with excessive duplication between regulators and little recognition of work already done by trusted counterparts abroad. This May, the Office for Nuclear Regulation responded. It set a new ambition: reactor design assessment in two years, not the current process’s much longer timeline. It also published a policy to draw on the judgements of trusted international regulators, rather than starting every review from zero.
That is exactly the right instinct. The mistake would be to treat it as a technocratic tidy-up instead of what it actually is: an admission that the caution was never really about safety, it was about process for its own sake.
What should happen next
Say the quiet part out loud. Ministers should stop hiding nuclear policy behind claims of public wariness that the polling doesn’t support. Own the ambition. The country wants this built.
That ambition now has an official number attached to it. The party’s new energy policy, set out this August by the Shadow Energy Secretary, commits to more than tripling UK nuclear capacity to 20GW by 2050, funded through the regulated asset base model already being used to de-risk Sizewell C. That’s the right target, and it’s a genuinely bold one. The test now is whether the regulatory reform keeps pace with the ambition — a 20GW commitment is worth nothing if every station on the way there still has to clear the same decade-long process Hinkley did.
Finish what the Taskforce started. Take the two-year assessment target and the international-recognition policy from proposal to statutory guarantee, with a genuine deadline that can’t drift the way Hinkley’s timeline has.
Build in fleets, not one-offs. Commit publicly to repeating proven designs, Sizewell C’s near-identical twin to Hinkley should be the first of many, not a one-time coincidence, and let the planning and consenting burden shrink with every repeat, the way costs already do on site.
Treat fast, safe nuclear as a growth story, not a risk to be managed. France undercuts the rest of Europe on electricity prices because it made this bet fifty years ago. Korea now exports the reactors other countries can’t build themselves. Britain invented civil nuclear power. There’s no reason it should now be the country still afraid to build it.
The public settled this argument a while ago. It’s time the system that’s supposed to serve them caught up.