Six years late and £28bn over budget, this project signals disaster for Ed Miliband's nuclear plans

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'Build and repeat.' That is the plan for Sizewell C, the nuclear plant on the Suffolk coast which Ed Miliband has announced plans to pump billions of pounds into. Writing in The Telegraph, he hailed a new 'golden age' for the British nuclear industry, pledging £14.2 billion for two reactors at Sizewell which will, eventually, provide six million homes with electricity.
Eventually being the operative word. News that the Government is throwing its weight behind nuclear in the midst of the Energy Secretary's pursuit of net zero was met with relief by some campaigners – and, indeed, by anyone who doesn't want to find themselves plunged into darkness if the grid is forced to grapple with unreliable renewables. But concerns have been raised about the modelling. Sizewell is to be a rinse and repeat of Hinkley Point C, the two-reactor power station in Somerset which has been beset with problems from the moment EDF first broke ground there in early 2017.
The Government says it's to be almost an exact replica. Meanwhile on its website, Sizewell C points to 'the benefits of replication'. 'Sizewell C will use the same design as Hinkley Point C,' it adds.
It says Hinkley has already 'created a huge workforce and supply chain' and that replication 'means Sizewell C will benefit from all the efficiencies and expertise learnt by our sister project'.
Efficiency and expertise. It's one way of summing up Hinkley, though it does rather overlook the £28 billion it has gone over budget to date, the endless delays and challenges from environmentalists, not to mention the international political tensions.
China's General Nuclear is a significant shareholder in the project, but in 2023 halted funding for it as relations between London and Beijing worsened; the same year the UK government took over the country's stake in Sizewell C.
Meanwhile, work at the site crawls on, its deadline shifting and bill expanding.
Still, EDF says Hinkley's second reactor is being built 25 per cent faster than the first unit, and suggests this should be taken as good news for Sizewell's envisaged two reactors, which are, effectively, planned to be the third and fourth in Britain's nuclear quartet.
Meanwhile, experts agree it makes sense in principle to transfer the lessons learnt and systems already established at the Somerset site to Suffolk. Iolo James, head of communications at the Nuclear Industry Association, stresses the importance of 'building in fleet rather than building one at a time'. 'The more you build, the cheaper and quicker that is,' he says.
That may be true, though there has been nothing cheap or quick about Britain's nuclear renaissance so far. Where we were once pioneers in the push for nuclear power (the world's first commercial-scale nuclear power station came online in Calder Hall, Cumbria, in 1956), decades of sparse investment have meant the UK has now fallen far behind other countries.
At Sizewell, many question how possible it will be in practice to shift operations from one side of England to the other. Alison Downes, of the campaign group Stop Sizewell C, suspects the idea that you can simply move teams and processes without a hitch is unrealistic. 'The company want people involved in Hinkley Point C to come over and do what they've done there again at Sizewell C, but unless there's a seamless transition and the roles that they're just finishing at Hinkley start at Sizewell, then the likelihood is those people will go off and find other jobs and then are lost to the supply chain,' she says.
'Hinkley has been delayed, yes, but Sizewell has also been delayed. It's very difficult to get two projects of this size to perfectly dovetail.'
Even if they do manage to bring some of that infrastructure across, it's hard to make the case that Hinkley has been a poster project for Britain's nuclear prowess.
Last February, EDF said it had taken a near £11 billion hit amid delays and overrunning costs on the project. The month before, it said the plant was expected to be completed by 2031 and cost up to £35 billion. Factoring in inflation, the real figure could be more like £46 billion.
It was, let's not forget, initially supposed to have started generating electricity in 2017 and cost £18 billion. When construction finally began the same year, it was expected that the plant would be completed by 2025.
It will now come online six years later than that and at more than double the cost of the initial estimate. So not, it would be fair to say, an unmitigated success as major infrastructure projects go.
Then again, some would argue successful infrastructure is an oxymoron in Britain today. The latest estimated spend for HS2 is £102 billion – almost double the projected cost. Crossrail cost £4 billion more than expected and weathered significant delays. And across the country, countless projects – bridges, tramlines and motorways – remain unfinished or unbuilt altogether.
'The public expectations on this sort of stuff is so low nowadays,' says Ed Shackle, a researcher at Public First. 'With all of these big promises – and that goes for things like HS2 as well – they are not expecting the Government to do anything. They're very sceptical that the Government could deliver anything big.'
The plan to launch us into a nuclear-powered future might sound promising, but can Labour get it done? While the public is supportive of the idea of projects like Sizewell in principle (Public First's polling shows there is a 41 per cent net support for the building of new nuclear power stations) and wants the Government to make big swings, time and again they have seen these things fail or fall by the wayside. 'They think the country is in a very bad way and we need major overhaul, but major projects have been poorly managed and delivered, and in their local areas, people see decline everywhere,' says Shackle.
'They want to see actual delivery behind these big promises.'
Downes points out the last update on Hinkley came in January last year, 'when there were still five or six years to go, so there was plenty of time for things to get even worse'. That same month, EDF said further delays were in the offing because of a row about fish. The energy company was struggling to agree protection measures for fish in the River Severn. Fears thousands could be killed in water cooling intakes had 'the potential to delay the operation of the power station'.
This was after months of tussling with environmentalists over the plant's seawater cooling system. At the time, Sir Keir Starmer, then in opposition, said delays to Hinkley were evidence of a system that was 'holding us back and stifling growth', citing 'countless examples of Nimbys and zealots gumming up the legal system often for their own ideological blind spots to stop the Government building the infrastructure the country needs'.
Now, dovetailing the construction of Sizewell with Hinkley is one of the main things bolstering confidence in the Suffolk project. Stuart Crooks, managing director of Hinkley Point C, said the 'innovation and experience' developed at Hinkley 'will benefit our twin project at Sizewell C from the start'.
'We have trained a new workforce and built the nuclear supply chain,' Crooks says. 'Now those skilled workers and businesses can give Britain the energy security and economic growth it needs at Sizewell C, together with small modular reactors and future large nuclear plants.'
Supporters also argue things will be different the second time around. The first nuclear build since the 1990s, Hinkley, they say, was always destined to take longer and cost more than initially predicted. 'It's been well documented that Hinkley has had issues in terms of going over budget, and the timescale,' says James. 'That's predominantly due to the fact that we haven't built a nuclear power station in a generation... We've had to relearn how to build them.
'The way Sizewell will benefit from that is all the learnings from Hinkley will be there for Sizewell and its team when it starts construction in earnest... If you view Sizewell C as unit three and four [after Hinkley's one and two], then you'll see the efficiencies become even greater for that project.'
Julia Pyke, joint managing director of Sizewell C, tells The Telegraph the site would be an 'exact copy, above ground, of Hinkley Point C'.
'When the design for Hinkley was brought into the UK, they had to make 7,000 design changes – because we're a copy, the equivalent for us is just 60,' she says.
'What that means in practical terms is that we know, in a way that Hinkley didn't know, how much concrete we need to pour, how much steel we need, how much cable we need to buy; we know how many hours it took to undertake a task for the first unit at Hinkley and the savings they were able to make for the second unit, and we can learn from that. We have a greater cost certainty because of that fixed design.'
It sounds promising, but campaigners are less optimistic, pointing out the significant geographical differences between the sites. 'I get the principals behind replication – but the thing you can't do is replicate the site,' says Downes, who understands Sizewell is set to be a more expensive site to develop than Hinkley.
'There are very specific complexities around the Sizewell C site... It's quite likely that any savings they might expect to make through replication will be absorbed in the more complex groundworks.'
While Hinkley is 'a dry site', Sizewell C is by the sea. 'It's going to need huge sea defences. They've got to build a crossing over a Site of Special Scientific Interest. They've got to build a deep cut-off wall. There's a lot of associated development that's needed because there's less infrastructure than there is down at Hinkley Point C. These are the sorts of things that concern us.'
The Energy Secretary, for his part, is still adamant this is to be the start of a 'golden age'. 'We will not accept the status quo of failing to invest in the future and energy insecurity for our country,' he said. '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.'
He might like to pay a visit to voters on the Suffolk coast who will be looking at Hinkley as a test case and bracing for years spent living down the road from a construction site.
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