The 'Golden Age of Nuclear' is a Sham

It's SMRs for shiny data centres, but unreliable renewables for the rest of us

Rejoice! For we are at the dawn of a “golden age of nuclear”, as announced by the Government this week. This new era was marked by British and American firms signing a 'Memorandum of Understanding' about building new power stations in northeast England, reflecting new agreements between Governments on either side of the Atlantic.

New micro-modular nuclear power plants will, one day, power “advanced data centres” in Nottinghamshire, and another £80 million investment will supply London Gateway port and business park. And there will be “plans to conduct studies and evaluate sites in the UK for the deployment of the Natrium advanced reactor technology”.

All of this would be great news, but for one small problem. Yes, nuclear power may be pushing the electrons around an “advanced data centre” or even a business park. Yay! But the wider grid is not going to be served. None of it is going to make the slightest bit of positive difference to our energy bills. Not a penny is going to come off your yearly bill. Energy security will not improve.

Meanwhile, according to plans put forward by the National Energy System Operator (NESO), now under the control of Miliband’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, between now and 2030, the UK’s offshore wind capacity will triple from around 15 GW to between 43 and 50 GW. Onshore wind capacity will double from 14 GW to between 27 and 30 GW. Solar will triple, from 17 GW to between 45 and 47 GW. As has been widely explained on these pages, at the rates agreed by the Government and developers of these technologies, it is impossible for bills to be reduced.

Furthermore, the first five years of this “golden age of nuclear” will be marked by nuclear capacity falling from 6 GW to three by 2030. There is some hope that Hinkley Point C will join the atomic fleet in 2031, adding a further 3 GW of capacity. But in today’s prices, the plant will be making electricity that will cost £129.47 per MWh, or about 13p per kWh. That’s more than twice the cost of power from gas in August this year – £54.67 per MWh – according to market data. Hinkley Point C’s sister plant, Sizewell C, was commissioned recently, but is unlikely to be completed until the late 2030s, possibly into the 2040s. Between 2030 and then, Sizewell B will be shut down.

The fact is that Britain’s nuclear power is waning faster than new capacity can be brought online. And what's being developed has no potential to deliver anything of benefit to the UK’s industries, business or homes. Talk of powering “advanced data centres” and ports with small modular reactors (SMRs), as futuristic as that sounds, is talk of such facilities as 'energy islands', separate from the grid. That is not progress. That is an attempt to solve a problem for Britain’s prestige – to sustain some part of the economy involved in high-tech, while the rest of it is plunged into a regressive and expensive energy famine.

Sadly, many have bought into the mythology of high-tech energy as a Good Thing, in and of itself. Even the usually reliable Global Warming Policy Foundation was dazzled by the white heat of technology: “This is an important step in the right direction,” said GWPF’s Director, Lord Mackinlay. “Nuclear power is one of the few reliable, low-carbon energy sources capable of delivering secure, affordable electricity at scale.” Yes. But why, when, and for how much?

One of the problem’s afflicting nuclear power that makes it a distant prospect, and therefore no solution to our current and mid-term crises, is that strict nuclear regulations add to lead times and costs. After several years of negotiations, the plans for Hinkley Point C were finally approved in 2016, and construction began the following year. It will have been 13 years since the first shovels hit the ground in Somerset by the time the reactor’s first neutrons start their work.

The Government’s announcement attempts to address the problem. But to little effect. The deal, explains the press release, means that “if a reactor has already passed rigorous safety checks in one country, this work can be used by the other to support its assessment, avoiding duplicating work”. This will reduce “the time it takes for a nuclear project to get a licence from roughly three or four years to roughly two”. Time will tell. A great deal of time. Which we simply do not have.

Discussions about the constraints that planning and regulation also dominate the X timeline of Miliband’s opposite, Claire Coutinho. According to the Shadow Secretary of State’s plans for a nuclear renaissance (having committed Britain to no less of a 'green industrial revolution' than her successor, of course) all that is required to split the atom cheaply is to relax environmental regulations. The problem is that the plans have been developed by the Britain Remade outfit, which is funded by the European Climate Foundation and the Quadrature Climate Foundation, the latter of which made a £4 million grant to the Labour Government last year, and the former of which takes credit for policies that have nearly abolished coal from the entire European continent aa part of setting the EU’s climate policy framework out to 2050. Far from Net Zero scepticism and energy realism, the opposition is reading the script handed to it by the people who created the mess.

Nuclear power therefore seems to me to be very much a distraction. If NESO’s plans are realised, by 2030 Britain will have commissioned a whopping 80 GW of new renewable energy capacity, all of which will be producing unreliable power at prices far in excess of what is achievable using hydrocarbons, with prices further locked in by 'Contract for Difference' subsidies for 20 years. If the numbers mean little to you, then what you need to know is that peak demand in the UK is about 60 GW. That 80 GW adds to the extant 46 GW of renewable capacity, making 126 GW, which will spend a lot of its time being redundant, and all of which will have cost multiples of what conventional generating capacity would have cost.

The time for talking about nuclear, whether as a response to the (non-)problem of climate change or otherwise, was in the 1990s and 2000s. But at that time, the Green Blob queered the pitch against nuclear with emphasis on renewables. Policies that required suppliers to source increasing amounts of power from renewable sources seemed to be directed primarily at reducing reliance on coal, but the legislation explicitly took aim at nuclear too. And it was the Green Blob, too, which required more and more from developers of all kinds to take 'nature' and the 'environment' into account. The Green Blob is now talking about lifting green constraints because they have become a fetter on its own agenda.

This new distraction, then, seems to be a way to prevent discussion about the failures of Net Zero – to appeal to energy realists with discussions about technique: 'See – they are trying to keep the lights on – they’re investing in nuclear!' Meanwhile, the countryside and coastlines will be bombarded with turbines and solar PV panels. Nuclear power was always a potential solution to the (non-)problem, which could have obviated the need for renewable power before turbines loomed over these green and pleasant lands in their thousands. But policy was guided by ideology (and money), and now it is too late.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I am a big fan of nuclear energy. But I am also a realist. And energy realism (and indeed scepticism) requires that we put megawatts and pounds before technology and prestige. And when we do that, we discover that, for all the talk of the benefits of British nuclear, it fares no better in relation to its construction schedules or costs than even renewable energy. And we’re in a crisis now, which requires immediate cost-effective remedies now, if what remains of our economy is to be salvaged.

An old, perhaps somewhat unkind, but not wholly untruthful maxim has it that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. I can’t help thinking that a ‘memorandum of understanding’ on US-UK cooperation on SMRs is of no greater consequence than the failed-musicians-turned-critics’ poetic fawning over their heroes. Talking about nuclear is like knitting about chocolate, perhaps. At the end, all you end up with is something that has taken a long time and doesn’t address any particular need, and probably could have been bought for less, in a great deal less time.

There is a place for nuclear in a rational discussion about energy policy. The only party to have put it in its proper place is the reinvented SDP in a policy paper Energy Abundance. The paper observes that an unhealthy preoccupation with Net Zero targets and renewable energy has caused a looming energy gap, which requires urgent intervention. To address this problem, subsidies would be terminated by the party after negotiating reasonable terms with developers, and a fraction of the monies designated to Net Zero will go towards the construction of “40 GW of new natural gas generation and 20 GW of coal generation at a capital cost of £60 billion”, both of which can be deployed far more rapidly than either renewables or nuclear. Once the grid has been stabilised, and lower prices (10p per kWH is the target price) have enabled consumption to increase and industries to be re-established, the nuclear renaissance can then begin.

This is a departure from 'knitting about chocolate', because at its core, the SDP’s plan is driven by an understanding of what energy is for, and what practical limitations exist, not by ideology, targets and policymakers search for prestige on world stages. No doubt, there may well be problems with the details of the SDP’s idea, as there are going to be with any policy agenda. But those are nothing compared to the extant problems with the climate and energy agenda. For example, not least of these problems, some may find the SDP’s emphasis on state ownership sticks in their throat.

I sympathise. But look at the cost estimates. Whereas the SDP finds that misguided green policies have already cost us £3 trillion, and that NESO predicted in 2020 that Net Zero would cost a further £3 trillion out to 2050 (£100 billion per year), the first phases of the SDP’s 10 year plan delivers 60 GW for £60 billion. That’s about as much as Miliband wastes every six months.

There needs to be this form of rational cost expectation and baseline before discussions about infrastructure projects can take place. In the SDP’s formulation, that’s about £1 billion per gigawatt of conventional generating capacity, and £2.3 billion for nuclear (which has much lower fuel costs). Without such constraints, plans like Hinkley Point C and HS2, which make sense only from the point of preening princes seeking prestige, costs escalate as those governments lose control of their vanity and policy agendas, their reputations having been gambled.

Hinkley point C (£10 billion per gigawatt and rising) was dubbed 'the most expensive power station in the world' because the energy market had been so distorted, and the government has made plain its desperation to sustain the climate agenda and 'keep the lights on', while destroying coal-fired plants. The Government’s nuclear plans, by contrast are not merely uncosted and clouded by preceding governments’ failures, they are utterly pointless from the point of view of the consumer. And so, seen from that perspective, the phony waffle from the Government and Opposition, and the Blob organisations that surround them, really might just as well be knitting about chocolate.