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 The concept is sixteen years out of date.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.
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