Key questions answered on Sizewell C after Reeves confirms nuclear investment
'Where is the benefit for voters in ploughing more money into Sizewell C that could be spent on other priorities, and when the project will add to consumer bills and is guaranteed to be late and overspent just like Hinkley C?
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The Herald Scotland
15 hours ago
- The Herald Scotland
SNP ban on nuclear energy is ‘abdication of responsibility'
Today, we exclusively reveal the industry response in the week that the UK Government announced it would create 10,000 jobs with £14 billion-plus investment in a new-era nuclear plant in England. It prompted an angry response from the GMB Scotland union which has written to the Scottish energy secretary calling for a change in stance. Torness, East Lothian. (Image: Getty Images) Louise Gilmour, GMB Scotland secretary, said it is 'beyond time for SNP ministers to exploit the potential of new nuclear energy to achieve net zero and create jobs'. She said: 'New nuclear can help provide a baseload of safe, clean and secure energy while creating thousands of skilled, well-paid, unionised jobs in Scotland. 'The Holyrood government's absolute refusal to seriously consider its potential is an abdication of responsibility and needs to change. 'It makes no sense if ministers want to achieve net zero targets and it makes no sense if they want Scotland's economy to grow again.' The nuclear industry supports almost 3,700 jobs in Scotland adding £400 million to the economy but Ms Gilmour said that is 'only a fraction of the potential economic benefits if the Scottish Government reverses its ban on new nuclear power'. She has urged ministers to trigger an immediate review of future options. READ MORE: 'We need new nuclear to deliver a golden age of clean energy abundance, because that is the only way to protect family finances, take back control of our energy, and tackle the climate crisis. 'This is the Government's clean energy mission in action, investing in lower bills and good jobs for energy security.' A spokesperson also said: 'The announcement comes as the UK Government is set to confirm one of Europe's first Small Modular Reactor programmes. This comes alongside record investment in R&D for fusion energy, worth over £2.5bn over five years. Taken together with Sizewell C, this delivers the biggest nuclear building programme in a generation.' Ms Gilmour wrote to Gillian Martin, Scottish energy secretary: 'A total of 10,000 jobs will be created at Sizewell alone. Where in Scotland are jobs being created at such a scale?' I reported this week that among the Labour government's plans is the redevelopment of a major nuclear base in Scotland. It signals a 'multi-decade' commitment to the site where around 6,500 people work. The UK Government plans a multi-billion-pound redevelopment of His Majesty's Naval Base (HMNB) Clyde. An initial £250 million of funding will be made over three years which will help support 'jobs, skills and growth' at Faslane, the Royal Navy's main presence in Scotland. Westminster said that the "Clyde 2070 programme represents one of the most significant and sustained UK Government investments in Scotland over the coming decades". A Scottish Government spokesperson said: "The Scottish Government is focussed on supporting growth and creating jobs by capitalising on Scotland's immense renewable energy capacity rather than expensive new nuclear energy which takes decades to build, creates toxic waste which is difficult and costly to dispose of and does not generate power at a cost that will bring down energy bills."
The Guardian
a day ago
- The Guardian
Spending billions on unclean, risky energy? What a nuclear waste
Rolls-Royce pressurised water reactors have powered British nuclear subs since 1966, but small modular reactors (SMRs) aren't yet proven at scale anywhere on land (Rolls-Royce named winning bidder for UK small nuclear reactors, 10 June). Only three are operating worldwide: two in Russia, one in China. Argentina is constructing the world's fourth; is Labour simply keen to keep up with historical geopolitical rivals (Sizewell C power station to be built as part of UK's £14bn nuclear investment, 10 June)? The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) reported actual cost overruns of 300% to 700% for all four projects. Rolls-Royce claims costs of £35 to £50 per MWh; so should we triple this? The government says the SMR project would create 3,000 new low-carbon British jobs, but at what cost? The energy secretary, Ed Miliband, can't know the true costs yet, and three reactors doesn't scream 'economies of scale'. Yet £2.5bn is already 10 times more than Great British Energy has invested into simple, cheap rooftop solar, which democratises energy savings. The true cost of renewables must consider intermittency and balancing costs, but why not invest more in flexibility through distributed renewables and grid-scale storage? And what of energy security? SMRs may mitigate against Putin snipping offshore wind cables, but increased reliance on imported uranium, and a heightened nuclear waste security threat, are significant risks. Last May, the IEEFA concluded that SMRs 'are still too expensive, too slow and too risky', and that we 'should embrace the reality that renewables, not SMRs, are the near-term solution to the energy transition'. Has this truly changed? The climate crisis requires scaling all feasible solutions as fast as possible, but, with limited capital, we should prioritise those that make economic sense HillMBA student, Cambridge Judge Business School As Nils Pratley says, Great British Energy's budget has been nuked to divert funding away from local energy initiatives (11 June). But let's get away from the idea that SMRs are a cutting-edge technology. Rolls-Royce is proposing a 470MW reactor, the same size as the first-generation Magnox reactors. Their 'small' modular reactor, if it ever emerges, will use the familiar method of generating a lot of heat in a very complex and expensive manner, in order to boil water and turn a turbine. It will bequeath yet more radioactive waste to add to the burden and risk at Sellafield. In the meantime, if government SMR funding continues, it takes money away from opportunities for cutting-edge technical and social innovation, discovery and training all around the country, as schools, hospitals, community groups, network operators and all of us get to grips with renewables-based systems. This sort of innovation is necessary, it's already benefiting us and it needs full-on government support rather than uneasy compromises with an increasingly redundant nuclear DarbyEmerita research fellow, Environmental Change Institute I'm a Scot who moved to the US in 1982. I returned to the UK seven years ago. In my time in the US, I worked with a few contractors as a chemist and health and safety manager on a number of environmental clean-up projects, chemical, biological and nuclear. The nuclear clean-up sites I worked on directly and indirectly were Hanford in Washington state, and Rocky Flats, Colorado. The multibillion-dollar Hanford cleanup is ongoing. Most of the problems there are as a result of gross mismanagement of nuclear waste during the cold war. I very much believe in wind, solar and other environmental solutions to energy production. I am cautiously supportive of small‑scale nuclear energy, but outraged by this government's failure to include the costs of the disposal of past, current and future nuclear waste in its support of 'cheap energy'. Has Ed Miliband taken into account future waste management issues? Google Hanford cleanup to see the real expense. Can we trust this and any future government to protect the environment, public health and the taxpayer from future nuclear 'cost overruns'?Peter HolmyardEdinburgh The more I read about the government's nuclear intentions, the more it sounds like HS2 all over again, ie another financial boondoggle. Where are the detailed costings? What is our experience with cost overruns, eg at Hinkley Point C? What is the overseas experience with pressurised water reactors (the kind proposed for Sizewell C) at Olkiluoto, at Flamanville, at Taishan? Uniformly bad in all cases, actually. No matter which way you look at this, viz the future cost overruns, the facts that we consumers will be on the hook for them, that reactors are never constructed on time, that nuclear wastes are unaudited, that we have to import all our uranium, that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated in 2023 that renewables are 10 times better than nuclear at lowering carbon emissions, all point to a remarkably poor decision by the government, sad to Ian FairlieIndependent consultant on radioactivity in the environment; vice-president, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Have an opinion on anything you've read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
Telegraph
2 days ago
- Telegraph
Miliband is wasting billions on the wrong nuclear technology
Ed Miliband first succumbed to his idée fixe on Sizewell C in 2009 and that is the problem. The concept is sixteen years out of date. The technological and commercial case for European pressurised reactors (EPR) has been diminishing ever since. It is not a question of whether you are for or against nuclear, or for or against renewables. That culture war absolutism does no favours to the nation. Nuclear technology is in a state of creative revolutionary ferment in America and China. Sizewell C is a throwback to another age. It is a very expensive refinement of 20th-century fission – Gen III in the jargon – with layer after layer of protective barriers, able to withstand an earthquake, a tsunami, a head-on crash by an A380, or a meltdown of the core. You pay to make this old technology super-safe. The International Energy Agency says the capital cost of Hinkley Point, the sister EPR plant to Sizewell C, works out at $16,000 (£12,000) per kilowatt (kW) of gross capacity, compared to $2,700 kW for the simpler Saeul 1 and 2 reactors in Korea. There are hidden subsidies in the Korean figures, but the gap is astonishing. By the time Sizewell C delivers its first watt to the grid in the late 2030s – or 2040 more likely – the world will already be humming with small modular reactors (SMRs) that can made in factories like Nissan Micras, shipped in parts by road and rail, and rolled out in a third of the time. Bill Gates started building his advanced SMR in Wyoming a year ago. If that does not make you stop and pause, it ought to. His TerraPower Gen IV Natrium plant is radically different from old light-water reactors. It is a pocket-sized 350 megawatt (MW) sodium-cooled reactor coupled with molten salt storage. It can ramp up to 500 MW when needed. It dovetails with a modern flexible decentralised grid. The project is built on the site of a coal-powered plant, which means that cables, roads and an eager workforce are all in place. That slashes the cost by 30pc and takes years off the development time. TerraPower originally hoped to supply dispatchable zero-carbon power at $50-$60 per megawatt hour (MWh). Inflation will have pushed up the cost but it is still likely to be a lot lower than Hinkley Point at a strike price of $178 (in today's money). The company is eyeing the UK market. I am willing to bet that TerraPower or something like it will be generating electricity for British data centres or industrial hubs years before Sizewell C fires up – if it ever gets that far, which I question. Or there is X-energy, co-owned by Amazon and able to tap the capital markets for near unlimited sums. It has applied to build its 80 MW, helium-cooled mini-reactors in Texas to supply Dow's petrochemical campus. Unlike the Hinkley-Sizewell reactors, its SMR generates both electricity and 'high-quality heat' (750 degrees) that can be used for heavy industries. It can flex up and down, does not need a vast containment dome and requires no refuelling halts. If not these two, it could be one of the 80 or so different SMR technologies in the global nuclear race, several funded by tech billionaires. Labour has selected the Rolls-Royce design for Britain's first batch of SMRs. They will supply the grid. I heartily applaud. It is home-grown technology and will have 80pc domestic content. It supports a defence company that is critical for UK rearmament and nuclear submarines. What worries me is that a) it is a small version of a standard light-water reactor, and b) the target date has slipped to the mid-2030s. If we are going to press ahead with an older Gen III technology, we had better get a move on. Great British Nuclear has ordered three of the 470 MW reactors; a good signal, yes, but too few to turbo-charge development and pull forward delivery. 'It is not enough to stand up commercial operations,' said the company's Dan Gould. Rolls-Royce is in SMR talks with the Czech Republic, Sweden, Poland and a host of other countries, as well as with a private energy group in the Netherlands. Nothing is yet firm. Mr Miliband would have done better with our money to order 10 or 12 Rolls-Royce reactors. That would have reached critical mass and crowded in hesitant buyers. Instead, Labour is committing a further £14.2bn to Sizewell C and blowing smoke in our eyes with its 'regulated asset base model'. 'They are not telling us how much this is going to cost. They are hiding behind the RAB model,' said Michael Liebreich, founder of BNEF. I would be more forgiving if the Government had not botched the 3.8 gigawatt (GW) Xlinks project, which has money lined up, requires no taxpayer subsidy and is offering to start supplying the UK with baseload power from southern Morocco by 2030. The plan combines Sahara solar power with desert winds that kick up every evening (a convection effect), generating electricity all year round. It would be transmitted to Cornwall via the world's longest cables. All that Xlinks needs is a standard contract for difference of circa £75 MWh and it can start building. Labour has sat on it. Nuclear fusion is further away than SMRs but it is no longer science fiction. High-temperature superconductors have suddenly made it possible to build a fusion plant 40 times smaller than once was the case. This radically changes the economics of fusing hydrogen isotopes to make power, either by squeezing super hot plasma inside a tokamak with magnets, or by inertial fusion with lasers. It has unlocked a torrent of investment funding. Britain is a world-class player in the field, the legacy of the Joint European Torus project at Culham. Mr Miliband did well to secure another £2.5bn to keep this country in the fusion race, funding both the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (Step) in Nottingham and the wider fusion ecosystem around Oxford. Britain should have valuable niches breeding tritium fuel and making superconducting magnets for the world market. Fusion ticks every box. It provides clean, constant baseload power. It creates almost no long-term waste. It is so safe that it can be regulated like a hospital. It uses almost no land and little water. I have no idea what it will cost but Bob Mumgaard, the head of America's Commonwealth Fusion Systems, told me that he was aiming for $80 MWh at his first plant in Virginia in the early 2030s. I have heard similar figures from other fusion companies. Where does Sizewell C fit in this new nuclear order? We know the track record of EPR reactors. The Flamanville project in France was 12 years late and six times over budget. The French Cour des Comptes says the final tally was €19.1bn (£16.3bn), calling it an 'operational failure', undertaken with hubris. Perhaps Flamanville was unlucky. The concrete pillars were 'pockmarked with holes'. Nobody noticed for nine months that the steel reactor vessel had unsafe levels of carbon content. We were told that lessons had been learnt, both there and at Olkiluoto in Finland. The next in the EPR series, at Hinkley Point, would be faster and cheaper. Dream on. I am not against bold industrial ventures. They lift the national spirit. Defenders say the costs of Hinkley and Sizewell are much lower than the nosebleed headline figures once you stretch the lifetime to 60 or 80 years. Realists say we need a large enough nuclear power industry to sustain our military nuclear deterrent. I get all that. But locking the country into yesterday's technology as far out as the 22nd century is a fateful step. It will not cut energy bills – ceteris paribus – and is not needed to tackle green intermittency. We can rely on cheaper gas peaker plants to buttress renewables for a few more years until SMRs, fusion and new fission come of age. Let me make a wager. Sizewell C will not survive real scrutiny or the next austerity crisis. It has HS2 written all over it.
