nuclear-news

Nuclear company NuGen is now strangely silent, as China and South Korea moanouvre around funding Moorside project

CORE 5th Nov 2017, NuGen’s updates on progress with its Moorside new-build project are an
extremely rare commodity these days in the UK. The last update, made six
months ago, reported CEO Tom Samson as saying that ‘a universe of
options’ remained available to NuGen – even with the bankrupt
Westinghouse and its AP1000 reactors apparently kicked into the long grass.

This starry-eyed view of available options must, in reality, be limited to
the current interest expressed in NuGen’s project by Chinese and South
Korean investors, both of whom are likely to insist on the deployment of
their own ‘in house’ reactors.

With little information on progress by the traditionally inscrutable Chinese Government and its state-backed China
General Nuclear (CGN) seeing the light of day recently, South Korea has
been busy number-crunching behind the scenes to work out how the $18Bn
(around £14Bn at today’s exchange rate) might be raised to buy out
Toshiba’s stake in the moribund West Cumbrian project.

A little reported article by Business Korea on 17th October states that a Nuclear Power Plant
Export Strategy meeting in Seoul on 10th October had devised a plan to
raise the $18Bn (around £14Bn at today’s exchange rate) required to take
control of Moorside. Under the plan – and through a ‘project financing
structure’ overseen by the South Korean Government – $7Bn in primary
financial arrangement would be provided by three export financial
institutions – the Export-Import Bank of Korea, the Korea Development
Bank and the Korea Trade Insurance Corporation. An additional $2.2Bn would
come from KEPCO itself and a further $5.6Bn raised jointly from the UK
Government (Infrastructure and Project Authority), the Japan Bank for
International Cooperation and the US Export/Import Bank.

The balance of $3.2Bn would be raised by ‘project operators’. Whether or not these
plans are turned into reality, they provide at least some clue as to what
is happening behind the scenes.

This is more than can be said for NuGen for, despite CEO Tom Samson’s astrological ‘110% certainty’
(curiously upgraded later to 120%) that Moorside would go ahead, its last
public pronouncement on 16th May 2017 advised that it had been forced to
hit the pause button on the project because of investor uncertainty, and
that a strategic review had been initiated on Moorside’s future.

Since then, having virtually disappeared as an entity from the Cumbrian radar
screen and consigned its local stakeholders and consultees to the darkest
black hole, NuGen’s sole website contributions have been confined to the
opening of a memorial beach garden north of Whitehaven and a cycle ride
around Moorside by students from NuGen’s ‘Bright Sparks’ educational
programme.  http://corecumbria.co.uk/briefings/south-korea-number-crunching-its-way-to-moorside/

November 8, 2017 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international, UK