nuclear-news

Yet more delay at Flamanville nuclear debacle – doesn’t bode well for UK’s Hinkley Point C project

Times 27th July 2019 As French existential jokes go, little beats building a nuclear power plant
at a place called Flammable. OK, it’s actually Flamanville. But who cares
about that sort of nicety – not least when the project’s proving so
incendiary?

It was due to be up and running in 2012 at a cost of €3.3
billion. Not only that. Flaming Ville was to be the showcase for the
European Pressurised Reactor, the wizzy new tech developed by the
state-backed EDF. True, it’s living up to the pressurised bit, at least for
EDF boss Jean-Bernard Lévy.

He’s just been forced to announce another
delay: a howitzer, even by usual standards, of “more than three years”. The
end of 2022 is now the earliest start date; a delay bound to jack up
project costs that have already exploded to €10.9 billion

The reason?
France’s spoilsport nuclear safety authority has ordered EDF to repair
eight bits of dodgy welding: who’d have thought nukes had to be welded
together properly? And, yes, the whole thing is turning into a nice French
farce. Except for one thing, of course: the joke’s on us.

Flamanville is the prototype for our very own nuclear disaster: the £20 billion Hinkley
Point C. It’s being built by EDF and the Chinese in return for the
contractual right to fleece UK consumers for 35 years: an index-linked,
guaranteed £92.50 per megawatt hour that’s twice the wholesale price. Even
better, the 3,200MW Hinkley is the planned forerunner for a fleet of new
nukes.

Indeed, so thrilling is the prospect that Greg Clark spent his dying
days as business secretary agonising over whether it might actually be
better to fleece consumers upfront instead, via his “regulated asset base”
funding model, before the plant was built. His verdict? A “consultation”,
the sort of non-decision-making for which he was deservedly sacked. Surely
someone in government can see the big picture here.

It’s not just
Flamanville that’s proving new nuclear so radioactive; a heady mix of
last-century tech, uncontrollable costs, endless delays and a dirty great
clean-up bill. EDF’s sister project, at Olkiluoto in Finland, has proved a
similar disaster. And didn’t ministers notice while their mooted plant at
Moorside was imploding that the project’s promoter, Japan’s Toshiba, was
blowing itself in the US with subsidiary Westinghouse?

No bribe was big enough, either, for Hitachi at Wylfa: no big shock when the group’s from
Fukushima-land. True, nuclear accounts for a fifth of Britain’s energy
needs. But its costs keep going up, while those of wind, solar, battery
power and carbon capture are falling. And they don’t require dangerous
clean-ups. Yes, maybe it’s too late to stop Hinkley. But someone in Boris’s
new team must see that new nuclear’s a route to torching money. Flammable
is all the evidence they need.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/5268801e-afd9-11e9-84cf-31ddba0e0fae

July 29, 2019 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, UK