Nuclear Power: The Government’s Commitment Issues
Vicar: She’s a lovely girl but do you have commitment issues?
Groom to be: I can’t say I do.
Yes, I know it is an old joke but it captures Downing Street’s lack of commitment to nuclear power. Back in 2008, the government noticed that nuclear power was essential to a zero carbon future but all extant and planned nuclear power plants would reach the ends of their lives and need to be decommissioned before the lost capacity could be replaced. The current (January 2022, National Audit Office) estimate is that the seven advanced gas-cooled reactors (AGRs) and one pressurised water reactor (PWR) need to be decommissioned by 2028.
By 2008, Sizewell was identified as one of the eight locations which had been given the “go-ahead” for construction. John Hutton, then Business Secretary, said he hoped the first one would be completed "well before 2020". Hinkley Point C (the first on account of being the only one of the eight to make it into actual construction) is now expected to be operational in 2025 (maybe). It will supply 3.2GW or 7% of UK current needs, and perhaps 3.5% of 2050 needs if carbon zero is achieved by then, i.e. current non-electric energy sources such as fossil fuels for transport and domestic heating are converted to electricity.
Moving still with the speed of a hobbled tortoise, November 2012 saw Sizewell confirmed as a possibility and proposals were received from EDF. By 2018, the government’s list of seven new nuclear power stations was down to two: Hinkley Point C and Wylfa, but that was promptly cancelled. Last October, it was resurrected but only as a possibility. No commitment has been made. Two others had been cancelled and three, including Sizewell C, were only for discussion.
Four years on, we were assured the Sizewell C decision would finally be taken in April 2022. Vain hope: an expert team has since asked for a six-week extension to prepare a report.
The Business Secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, granted their request and push back their deadline to 25 February” with further time for departmental consideration. On 27th January, Mr Kwarteng told the House of Commons that the government had acquired an option on the land and were giving EDF more money to help the project along: “However, I am clear that this agreement does not represent a Government decision that the Sizewell C project will progress.” A decision should be made before the end of this Parliament, i.e. 16 years after the government identified Sizewell C as an immediate replacement for the decommissioning reactors. Sizewell C is similar to Hinkley Point C, i.e. same output and fewer construction problems. However, it uses the same design as the Chinese reactor at Taishan which has recently been shut down because of damage to the fuel rods. This should cause Mr Kwarteng a certain amount of soul-searching.
The truth is that recent governments, other than the Scottish one, have proclaimed commitment to nuclear but vacillated and procrastinated, basically because successive short-sighted Chancellors have refused, unlike the French, to provide the moolah. The Nuclear Energy (Financing) Bill (2021-22) went through its Commons stages during the past month. It is not easy to understand and few MPs probably did. The Treasury likes it because it relieves them of paying for nuclear power stations such as Sizewell C. Instead, users will have to reimburse the City investors by paying far higher prices, i.e. fat margins, than should have been available from government utility financing. It is like the Private Finance Initiative, only worse. Transferring public capital expenditure in this way rips off the taxpayer/end user. The Treasury dresses it up in all kinds of clever language (read the Bill) and calls it the Resource Allocation Model or RAB. RAB actually stands for Robbing the Average Bloke.
The government’s dilly dallying over nuclear power and its financing scam are only two of the problems. The third is its complete failure to estimate how much nuclear sourced electricity we will need and how that should be generated. 24th January 2022 may not be a typical day but it is not that untypical either. According to the National Grid, 60% of our electricity then came from fossil fuels, 11.6% from nuclear, 9% from imports and 5% from renewable (wind and hydro). Dropping from the current nuclear output, to Hinkley plus Sizewell C, halves nuclear provision and if fossil fuels are taken out, renewables and imports would have to supply a steady 95% which is never going to happen. And it gets worse: these figures exclude fossil fuels not used to generate electricity, e.g. transport fuel and gas heating. And Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Never Never Land, insists that they can achieve zero carbon with no nuclear electricity at all. As a purist, she presumably rules out importing electricity from countries, like England and France, which use nuclear to produce their exports. Carbon capture and storage can fill some of the gaps but certainly not all of it, or not at affordable prices.
In short, a sane nuclear power policy needs careful calculation of our future needs and a commitment to following the example of the USA, Canada and China and embracing modern, cheap Generation IV advanced nuclear reactors (including but not confined to molten salt reactors) since they are the only way the British taxpayers will get the electricity they need at prices they can afford. Saying “I do” would not then be that difficult.