Ominous when coupled with today’s warning from the head of the British army that the UK public must be prepared to take up arms in a war against Vladimir Putin’s Russia
Hinkley Point C nuclear plant was originally supposed to start producing electricity from 2017 at a cost of £18bn. It is now reported that it could cost 46bn and be ready by 2029. Bloomberg even says that in a worst case scenario Unit 1 may not start until 2031.
Decommissioned: Hinkley Point B
Jonathon Porritt (below right) appraises the Government’s new Nuclear Roadmap
He points out that the new Nuclear Roadmap sets to one side any pretence that the links between our civil nuclear programme and our military defence needs were anything other than small-scale – and of no material strategic significance.
With quite startling transparency and clarity, the Roadmap not only reveals the full extent of those links, but positively celebrates that co-dependency as a massive plus in our ambition to achieve a Net Zero economy by 2050.
For years, suggestions by a small group of dedicated academics and campaigners that the UK Government’s Nuclear Energy Strategy is being driven primarily by the UK’s continuing commitment to an “independent” nuclear weapons capability.
Their Roadmap acknowledges the crucial importance of the nuclear industry to our national security, both in terms of energy supply and the defence nuclear enterprise, The strategy will:
“address the commonalities across the civil and defence supply chains, and the potential risk to our respective nuclear programmes due to competing demand for the supply chain, the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) is working closely with the Ministry of Defence and the Defence Nuclear Sector.”
Porritt predicts
- We will indeed end up with Hinkley Point C and possibly Sizewell C, though as yet the Government cannot currently guarantee the required level of investment.
- We will never get a third big reactor. The economics are literally impossible to justify.
We are unlikely to get more than a couple of hugely expensive Small Modular Reactors, at some indeterminate point in the future (see Professor Steve Thomas, left)- Worldwide, no commercial design of SMR has even received a firm order yet.
- And we may or may not get life extensions for the last five power stations in the “legacy fleet” – subject to regulatory approval, which may not be all that easy given extensive cracking in their reactor cores.
He describes the Roadmap as a massive and costly diversion from reality putting at risk our entire Net Zero by 2050 strategy because of “an increasingly anachronistic understanding of our place in the world (with a must-have seat at the nuclear powers’ table) and of what “national security” means, still permeates and contaminates both defence and energy strategies”. He ends:
“Ministers know all that. But they don’t really care. Our nuclear weapons programme (including upgrading Trident) will be protected as a consequence of this, via an unceasing flow of public money into the civil nuclear cul-de-sac, at a time when our defence budget is already massively overstretched. So who cares about the missing 24GW?”#
oOOo
More hopefully:
We’ll continue to see new investment into renewables here in the UK, despite (not because of) government policy, which has seriously messed up our offshore wind industry, maintained a de facto ban on onshore wind, couldn’t care less about solar, witters on vapidly about tidal without doing anything etc etc.
Meanwhile, on a global basis, renewables continue to boom. Here are a few facts – in contrast to over-excited sightings of nuclear unicorns:
- More renewable electricity has been generated in the last 5 years (in fact, enough to power the whole of the EU) than the entire output of today’s global nuclear fleet;
- Overall renewable capacity grew by 50% in 2023, adding a massive 500GW.
- China added 278GW of renewables in 2023 (more than 50% of the global total) in contrast to a paltry 1.2GW of new nuclear. And China is the most enthusiastic supporter of nuclear new build.
- According to the International Energy Agency, renewables will generate more than 40% of total global electricity by 2028.
o
Nuclear Industries 