Six years late and £28bn over budget, this project signals disaster for Ed Miliband’s nuclear plans

Labour is banking on Sizewell C to deliver the net zero goal – but its blueprint was fraught with problems.

Eleanor Steafel, Telegraph, 10 June 25

“Build and repeat.” That is the plan for Sizewell C, the nuclear plant on the Suffolk coast which Ed Miliband has announced plans to pump billions of pounds into. Writing in The Telegraph, he hailed a new “golden age” for the British nuclear industry, pledging £14.2 billion for two reactors at Sizewell which will, eventually, provide six million homes with electricity.

Eventually being the operative word. News that the Government is throwing its weight behind nuclear in the midst of the Energy Secretary’s pursuit of net zero was met with relief by some campaigners …. But concerns have been raised about the modelling. Sizewell is to be a rinse and repeat of Hinkley Point C, the two-reactor power station in Somerset which has been beset with problems from the moment EDF first broke ground there in early 2017.

The Government says it’s to be almost an exact replica. Meanwhile on its website, Sizewell C points to “the benefits of replication”. “Sizewell C will use the same design as Hinkley Point C,” it adds.

It says Hinkley has already “created a huge workforce and supply chain” and that replication “means Sizewell C will benefit from all the efficiencies and expertise learnt by our sister project”.

Efficiency and expertise. It’s one way of summing up Hinkley, though it does rather overlook the £28 billion it has gone over budget to date, the endless delays and challenges from environmentalists, not to mention the international political tensions.

China’s General Nuclear is a significant shareholder in the project, but in 2023 halted funding for it as relations between London and Beijing worsened; the same year the UK government took over the country’s stake in Sizewell C.

Meanwhile, work at the site crawls on, its deadline shifting and bill expanding………………………………………..

At Sizewell, many question how possible it will be in practice to shift operations from one side of England to the other. Alison Downes, of the campaign group Stop Sizewell C, suspects the idea that you can simply move teams and processes without a hitch is unrealistic. “The company want people involved in Hinkley Point C to come over and do what they’ve done there again at Sizewell C, but unless there’s a seamless transition and the roles that they’re just finishing at Hinkley start at Sizewell, then the likelihood is those people will go off and find other jobs and then are lost to the supply chain,” she says.

“Hinkley has been delayed, yes, but Sizewell has also been delayed. It’s very difficult to get two projects of this size to perfectly dovetail.”

Even if they do manage to bring some of that infrastructure across, it’s hard to make the case that Hinkley has been a poster project for Britain’s nuclear prowess.

Last February, EDF said it had taken a near £11 billion hit amid delays and overrunning costs on the project. The month before, it said the plant was expected to be completed by 2031 and cost up to £35 billion. Factoring in inflation, the real figure could be more like £46 billion.

It was, let’s not forget, initially supposed to have started generating electricity in 2017 and cost £18 billion. When construction finally began the same year, it was expected that the plant would be completed by 2025.

It will now come online six years later than that and at more than double the cost of the initial estimate. So not, it would be fair to say, an unmitigated success as major infrastructure projects go………………………….

Downes points out the last update on Hinkley came in January last year, “when there were still five or six years to go, so there was plenty of time for things to get even worse”. That same month, EDF said further delays were in the offing because of a row about fish. The energy company was struggling to agree protection measures for fish in the River Severn. Fears thousands could be killed in water cooling intakes had “the potential to delay the operation of the power station”.

…………………………..campaigners are less optimistic, pointing out the significant geographical differences between the sites. “I get the principals behind replication – but the thing you can’t do is replicate the site,” says Downes, who understands Sizewell is set to be a more expensive site to develop than Hinkley.

“There are very specific complexities around the Sizewell C site… It’s quite likely that any savings they might expect to make through replication will be absorbed in the more complex groundworks.”

While Hinkley is “a dry site”, Sizewell C is by the sea. “It’s going to need huge sea defences. They’ve got to build a crossing over a Site of Special Scientific Interest. They’ve got to build a deep cut-off wall. There’s a lot of associated development that’s needed because there’s less infrastructure than there is down at Hinkley Point C. These are the sorts of things that concern us.”………… https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/06/10/hinkley-point-c-blueprint-for-sizewell/