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Rhodri Morgan By Rhodri Morgan Rhodri Morgan: Beware the price promises of Hinkley Point nuclear station

Former First Minister and WalesOnline columnist Rhodri Morgan muses over the deal struck for ‘first private sector nuclear power station’ – run by four nationalised industries

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/news-opinion/rhodri-morgan-beware-price-promises-6243754

I could barely believe my  ears when I heard the announcement this week of  the new nuclear power station to be built at Hinkley  Point in Somerset, right opposite  Cardiff Airport.

The BBC kept referring to it as  Britain’s first-ever private sector  nuclear power station.

What the report should have said  was that it was to be built by a  consortium of four nationalised  industries, two French and two  Chinese.

Three of the four are 100%  state-owned and one is 85%.  Overseas nationalised industries are  not in the private sector.

In fact I doubt if any private  sector company could ever build  and operate a nuclear power station  now, because they would never be  able to get insurance cover.

When the last British nuclear  power station was built – Sizewell  C – in the late 1980s, it was built by  the Central Electricity Generating  Board, led by Lord (Walter)  Marshall, Margaret Thatcher’s  favourite scientist.

He was from Cardiff.

The Cardiff accent, which he  never lost, was so unfamiliar to his  super-brainy colleagues in the  atomic power industry that they all  thought he was one of the many  wartime refugees from Eastern  Europe, who had fled  the Nazis.

EDF, the lead company in the  consortium that will build the new  Hinkley Point “nuke”  is the French  equivalent of the CEGB.

The CEGB was privatised in  1989. It became Npower, now  German-owned.

That’s why we now have to turn  to the French and Chinese.

But regardless of which country’s  nationalised industries are building  the station, “ours” or “theirs”,  beware the promises about prices  you hear, when a new design of  power station hoves into view.

The new Hinkley station will  replace an Advanced Gas Cooled  Reactor-type station.

The launch of that particular type  of station back in 1965 was the  occasion of the most embarrassing  statement any cabinet minister has  ever made. Ever!

Fred Lee was the hapless energy  minister in Harold Wilson’s Labour  government who had to deliver the  statement to the House of  Commons.

It contained the  sentence “Electricity from these  new AGR nuclear power stations  will be too cheap to meter. [I’m not  making this up.] Britain has really  hit the jackpot this time”.

Oy Vey! Oy Vey!

Far from producing electricity  that was too cheap to meter, the  AGRs were almost impossible to  construct – an absolute disaster of  Concorde or even Poll Tax  proportions when it came to  wasting taxpayers’ money.

The new station will certainly create a building boom in the  south-west of England.

When people compare the Welsh  economy with that of the South  West, we normally think  instinctively, Wales – private sector  economy weak/public sector strong.  The South West – private sector  strong/public sector weak.

I wonder if that’s really true.

We get conventional regional  assistance, European aid etc.

The South West gets its “regional  aid” under a different heading, that’s  all. It’s called a  government-guaranteed £16bn  building project creating 25,000  jobs.

October 26, 2013 - Posted by arclight2011part2 | Uncategorized