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Hinkley Point and the fading nuclear power dream

The dreams of nuclear power fading with Hinkley Point, CARL MORTISHED, The Globe and Mail, Aug. 10, 2016 The future of nuclear power generation in Europe, North America and most of the developed world is being decided on an English coastal headland called Hinkley Point. Sadly, for the U.K., this is no great British engineering breakthrough; the technology of the new nuclear reactors is French and a third of the money is Chinese. Instead of celebrating a big foreign investment, the new post-Brexit British Prime Minister, Theresa May, has kicked into the long grass a £25-billion project that could deliver more than a tenth of Britain’s electricity for the next six decades.

It’s all gone wrong because of different perceptions of risk – political, financial or public and personal. Hinkley Point is iconic of everything that has gone wrong in the nuclear power industry since the first civil reactor, Calder Hall, began to deliver electrons into the U.K.’s electricity grid in 1956. There was huge excitement when the Queen signalled the start of the “atomic age” and the government promised electricity that would be “too cheap to meter.” Instead, electricity generated by nuclear fission has turned out to be very expensive, and the contract underpinning EDF’s investment in Hinkley Point has been struck at £92.5 per megawatt hour, twice the prevailing market price when the deal was done in 2012.

 That makes it sound like a great deal for French state-owned generator EDF and its Chinese partner, if not for British consumers. Unfortunately, no one at EDF headquarters is grinning. Instead, the company is split down the middle over the merits of a project whose escalating cost is reckoned by some to be potentially ruinous…………..

August 12, 2016 - Posted by | general

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