nuclear-news

Hinkley Point is glowing on my doorstep, but that won’t help us get a bus into town

In west Somerset broadband is patchy and childcare is scarce, but there’s always £10bn to spare for a badly run mega-project

WILLIAM SITWELL,

In west Somerset broadband is patchy and childcare is scarce,
but there’s always £10bn to spare for a badly run mega-project.

Some 10,000 people work on site there (with another 12,000 associated jobs elsewhere).
Lifting the 245-tonne steel roof onto the first reactor, a few weeks ago,
utilised the world’s largest land-based crane. Hinkley Point C (next to the
original facilities A and B) will power some six million homes and what I
lie in bed at night wondering about is how the hell they feed the 10,000.
The Chinese state-owned CGN has a one-third stake in Hinkley and the French
state-controlled energy company EDF controls the rest.

It’s due to start generating power in 2030 and is the world’s most expensive power station.
Then this week EDF announced that, whoops, they need another £10 billion.
Prices have increased since 2015, design changes require more steel and
concrete and, I imagine, given the French contingent at the facility,
increases in the price of butter have skyrocketed the projected costs of
croissants. The final costs could be around £46 billion with the project
looking at a four-year delay.

All of which is great if you’ve got a job
there, be it in security, catering or nuclear fission, but otherwise this
futurist megalith rather clashes with the neighbouring muddy fields of
Exmoor. There are three key stumbling blocks here: childcare is scarce,
broadband is patchy and there are no buses. Which leaves people feeling
that these infrastructure projects – Hinkley Point, HS2 – are like the huge
sewage pipes that run through the slums of Mumbai. They carve up and
disrupt the landscape and lives of those who exist around it, but it’s only
the comfortable middle classes who benefit.

Telegraph 27th Jan 2024

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/columnists/2024/01/27/william-sitwell-hinkley-point/

January 30, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, UK