‘A heroic endeavour’: Sizewell C’s £38bn plan to keep the lights on

As construction finally starts how will this megaproject be built, can
it avoid the pitfalls of previous nuclear plants, and is it worth the
money?

Hinkley Point is overdue and over budget, while the EPR has been
plagued by problems in other countries where it has been built. Small
wonder, then, that some have asked whether replicating Hinkley is a good
idea.

Julia Pyke is here to tell people that copying Hinkley is exactly
what we should be doing. “It’s better to build the thing you know how
to build because … it will be cheaper.” Hinkley has helped build up a
nuclear workforce that was in decline. Pyke recalled the first batch of
university interns at Sizewell C. “The majority of them literally
didn’t know that the UK had a nuclear industry. It had been that
quiet,” she said.

The deal struck last week will see the government take
a 45 per cent stake, with Canadian pension fund La Caisse holding 20 per
cent, British Gas owner Centrica 15 per cent, EDF 12.5 per cent, and Amber
Infrastructure the remaining 7.6 per cent.

The gargantuan cost will be 65
per cent funded by debt, and 35 per cent by equity. The government has
pencilled in a total cost of £55 billion for contingency and inflation
over the lifetime of the plant. Last week there was much noise around the
fact that Sizewell’s price tag had ballooned from an estimate of £20
billion, in 2015 money. The new figure accounts for inflation and “some
cost increase”, according to Pyke. One big difference between Hinkley and
Sizewell, she argued, is that the design is now better understood and
contracts will be tighter. Many of Hinkley’s overruns were blamed on
“cost-plus” contracts that allowed suppliers to ratchet up their bills.
Pyke pointed to a recent deal for civil engineering at Sizewell: “It’s
a contract which, roughly speaking, pays the contractors the actual cost of
doing a day’s work. And it aligns profit to achieved milestones. So
they’re not incentivised to run the job long.”

In any case, Pyke argued, talk of cost misses the point. Sizewell C will ultimately be an
asset for the taxpayer. And the project will pay billions in tax over its
lifespan. “The cost is an investment for society because it’s going to
give us energy security and lower bills, as well as pay tax … it has much
wider societal benefits.”

Alison Downes, executive director of the Stop
Sizewell C campaign, said that as a group, they had always tried to
emphasise the wider problems with the project, beyond their self-interest.
“One former EDF chief executive described the EPR design as too
complicated — almost unbuildable,” she said. “The long delays at EPRs
elsewhere in the world, the massive cost overruns, suggest that this
project will be very difficult to build. And the Sizewell site is complex.
Any savings are likely to be frittered away in more complicated
groundworks.”

Times 26th July 2025, https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/companies/article/sizewell-c-38bn-plan-to-keep-the-lights-on-ndszrldwd