nuclear-news

  Sizewell C nuclear power plant can’t be allowed to fail. 

 A £14 billion investment, Sizewell C’s funding will come from a levy on energy bills.
Will this plan succeed where others have run into problems? Insanity, they
say, is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different
outcome.

Every time a western country has built a European pressurised
reactor — a nuclear power station designed by the French — it has gone
pear-shaped. The one at Olkiluoto in Finland was 14 years late. The station
at Flamanville in France was a bit better, just 12 years behind schedule
and costing about four times the original budget. Here in the UK, Hinkley
Point C was variously promised for 2017, then this year, and now,
fingers-crossed, 2031.

Why then, you might wonder, has the government
thrown its financial muscle behind another EPR, this time at Sizewell on
the Suffolk coast? The £14 billion investment in Sizewell C (it’s the
third atomic power station to be built at this site) was one of the main
items in this week’s spending review.

I put this rather obvious question
to Simon Bowen, chairman of Great British Energy — Nuclear, the
snappily-named agency that used to be, err, Great British Nuclear, on Times
Radio on Tuesday. Bowen said the answer was that having built one, at
Hinkley Point, the next one would be cheaper and there was already good
evidence that practice was making perfect there. That might be true, but it
is also worth remembering the die was cast all the way back in 2008, when
Électricité de France (EdF), the French utility company that is building
Hinkley Point, bought British Energy. British Energy owned and operated the
UK’s remaining nuclear plants, but had fallen on hard times. There was a
government bailout and then a sale, both masterminded in part by Sir Adrian
Montague, now trying to do the same job at Thames Water.

EdF bought it for£12.5 billion and with it the nuclear sites that were front-runners to be
chosen for a new generation of power plants. The Cameron government
cemented things in place by making a deal with EdF and CGN, the Chinese
nuclear power company, that would see the latter take a stake in Hinkley
Point and a proposed new plant at Sizewell.

That plan evaporated when later
administrations decided we shouldn’t cosy up to the Chinese after all. We
still needed nuclear power, though, and as quickly as possible or our
net-zero targets would be all the more difficult to hit. Ditching the EPR
and choosing a new design for the Sizewell site would have taken years, so
in the end, ministers concluded, better to go with the devil you knew.

The only remaining question was how to pay for it. EdF is picking up the tab
for Hinkley Point, with the financing anchored by a guarantee from the
government to buy all the electricity generated at an agreed price. This
arrangement was extremely controversial at the time and in any event EdF is
not keen to take on another multibillion-pound risk. The Chinese are also
out.

The answer is that the money will come from you and me, via the same
finance scheme used to build the £4.5 billion Tideway super sewer, the
giant pipe that runs under the Thames and sucks up the sewage that used to
go into the river when it rained.

 Times 13th June 2025, https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/energy/article/sizewell-c-nuclear-power-plant-cant-be-allowed-to-fail-8l32szjnw

June 17, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, UK