Sizewell C: too expensive, too late
The decision to build new nuclear power stations in England and Wales was made by the Labour government in 2008, sixteen years ago. They could not forecast the rapid growth in renewable energy, the soaring costs of nuclear, nor the 2015 Climate Agreement whose targets cannot be met by the slow pace of nuclear construction. In 2008 wind and solar power were in their infancy, generating less than 10 million megawatt hours of electricity. Now they generate nearly 100 million and are accelerating every month, while nuclear new build has still not generated a single watt.
The price of renewable electric power is falling. The price of nuclear goes on rising. The Conservative government has stuck stubbornly to Labour's plan, but an incoming government will have to face the facts. The case for new nuclear has vanished.
At Hinkley Point in Somerset work started in 2010 to build two nuclear reactors with a 2025 target date for operation. Plagued with technical problems, delays and cost increases, they are nowhere near completion. By the time Hinkley is finished, probably in the mid-2030s, it will have cost its French and Chinese developers £46 billion – almost 3 times its original budget. But British consumers will be paying them back through their electricity bills because, as Parliament's Public Accounts Committee has stated, the Conservatives failed to protect energy consumers.
Instead they agreed that for each megawatt hour of Hinkley electricity its developers will receive £92.50 at 2022 prices for 35 years, linked to inflation. If the wholesale price is lower than £92.50, they will get top-up payments funded from customers' bills. Thanks to renewables, that price has dropped already. The Department of Business, Energy & Industrial strategy estimated in 2017 that customers will be paying a total of £30 billion. Now it will be astronomically higher.
Yet even these figures are dwarfed by what customers will have to pay if two identical reactors are built as proposed by the same French developer at Sizewell in East Suffolk. Here, the Government has loaded the whole cost of Sizewell C on to our electricity bills in advance without any idea of what that cost will be.
The reality now is that Sizewell C is not needed. It would not generate electricity for at least 15 years, and its output would come at a staggeringly high price to customers and cause irreparable damage to the local environment. Renewable energy from wind, solar and biofuels will by then provide all or most of our needs, and the remaining nuclear facilities – including Hinkley if ever finished – will be sufficient short-term addition.
The employment opportunities offered by new nuclear, although always exaggerated, must be replaced now by subsidised programmes of training and re-skilling for a wide variety of jobs in the expanding renewables sector. This is the clean, green future for energy. Nuclear is the past.
