Dissension in the nuclear lobby – it had to happen – Small Nuclear versus Big Nuclear.

Comment. As the UK fumbles its way through its “Civil Nuclear Roadmap” folly, the Rolls Royce lobby paints Hinkley and Sizewell projects as obsolete trash, and touts Rolls Royce’s non existent small reactors as Britain’s energy salvation .

Jeremy Warner: Outsourcing Britain’s nuclear renewal is insanity.
Rolls-Royce’s modular reactors are an obvious way to break free of EDF’s
grip.

Here we go again. Einstein’s definition of insanity is to keep doing
the same thing and expecting different outcomes. You would think that the
Government had learned its lesson on nuclear renewal after the debacle of
Hinkley Point C. Clearly not.

Having already made the same mistake once, by
pledging a replica of the ruinously costly Hinkley at Sizewell on the
Suffolk coast, ministers are doubling down and promising a third such
monstrosity somewhere else.

According to the Government’s “Nuclear
Roadmap”, published last week, another of these leviathans in an as yet
unspecified location is to be given the go-ahead later this year. On the
most recent estimates, Hinkley Point C is expected to cost at least 80pc
more than its original budget and is years behind schedule. Some fear that
it won’t be until the early 2030s before the reactors are fully
operational, such have been the technical and safety complications
encountered in the construction phase.

Ministers have also had to agree to
punishingly expensive output prices to persuade the main developer,
France’s state-controlled EDF, to build in the first place, committing
consumers to high electricity costs for decades to come. So much for the
promise once made by the ever courteous Vincent de Rivaz, the one-time boss
of EDF in Britain, that Hinkley Point would be cooking our Christmas
lunches by 2017.

Even allowing for the learning process – theoretically,
later projects to the same design should cost less, with past mistakes
taken on board – it beggars belief that the Government should attempt to
repeat such a tried and demonstrably poor value for money technology.

Given the experience of Hinkley Point C, why are we still pursuing the hugely
costly, largely obsolete technology of EDF’s gigawatt stations when there
are perfectly viable, but smaller, homegrown alternatives just waiting for
the opportunity to fill the gap? If we are to spend £28bn a year of
taxpayers’ money on going green, as promised by Labour, we should at
least be confident that a large part of the wider economic benefit is
reserved for UK supply chains, and is not instead squandered on supporting
jobs abroad in France, China, Denmark and the US.

Telegraph 13th Jan 2024

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/01/13/uk-go-full-nuclear-ensure-solutions-british/