Latest news with #HinkleyPoint
Reuters
9 hours ago
- Business
- Reuters
Apollo to provide $6 billion funding for UK's Hinkley point nuclear project, FT reports
June 20 (Reuters) - U.S. private equity group Apollo Global (APO.N), opens new tab will provide 4.5 billion pounds ($6.08 billion) in debt financing to support Britain's Hinkley Point nuclear project, the Financial Times reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. Apollo declined to comment on the report, while EDF did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. ($1 = 0.7407 pounds)
Telegraph
12-06-2025
- Business
- 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 The concept is sixteen years out of date.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.
Sky News
10-06-2025
- Business
- Sky News
Why the UK has warmed up to nuclear power again
Why you can trust Sky News For years nuclear was a dirty word. Now, the tide is turning. For the past 20 years or so, global nuclear power has stagnated amid concerns about its environmental damage and its safety after the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters. Another nail in its coffin appeared to be its appalling record of delays and spiralling costs, while wind and solar plummeted in price and soared in supply. But leaders are warming up to nuclear power again, driven by a few key trends. First and foremost, they are anxious to keep pace with booming demand for low-carbon energy, driven by an explosion of data centres and the switch to electric cars and heat pumps. Datacentres for AI and cloud computing not only have a voracious appetite for energy, but as they operate 24/7, they need a steady, reliable stream. Enter: nuclear, which can provide this most of the time. The 'flat pack' power plant Secondly, a new type of nuclear power plant may finally be on the horizon. The much vaunted small modular reactors (SMRs) promise to be much faster and cheaper to build than something like Hinkley Point, because the parts can be built in a factory and assembled on site - the flat pack furniture of nuclear power. They have long been celebrated but have failed to scale up. So far they exist only in Russia and China. Nevertheless, industry and political leaders in other countries are confident their own SMR designs are almost ready to go, and the government on Tuesday said it wants Rolls-Royce to get the UK's first SMRs online "in the 2030s". That's most likely another 10 years from now, so a mid-term solution, with much more clean power is needed in the meantime. It also announced £14bn for Sizewell C, continuing plans for a nuclear revival started by the Tories. Beyond the UK, leaders in the US, Canada, South Korea and France and even Japan - which suffered the 2011 Fukushima disaster - and Germany - which famously detests nuclear - are warming up to it again. And so are businesses - last year Google became the first company to sign an agreement to buy nuclear energy from Kairos Power's SMRs to power its data centres. Just last week Meta did the same with Constellation Energy. As for traditional big plants, some are now being built on time and on budget, such as Barakah in the UAE. The South Korean company behind it is in talks to build the same type in the UK. Safety concerns switch from disaster to climate Thirdly, countries are trying to get off fossil fuels to fend off worse climate change. Nuclear power is very low carbon, and it is also safer than many fear. Death rates from air pollution and accidents are lower from nuclear power than from any energy form other than solar power, research by data scientists at Oxford University's Our World in Data project suggest. Nuclear power also has the lowest greenhouse gas emissions of any energy form over its lifespan, and cancer rates from accidents can be mitigated by robust responses, the scientists said. The undeniable price tag That's not to say nuclear does no damage, and the government's announcement on Tuesday glossed over what it will do with the radioactive waste. Sizewell C has been very unpopular with some local campaign groups that protest its local damage to trees, birds and coastline, and they recently launched a fresh legal challenge to additional flood barriers. Traditional large reactors like Sizewell have also been eye-wateringly expensive and slow to build, and must be routinely taken offline for maintenance. Critics argue that solar and wind power, backed up by batteries, are faster, cheaper and safer. Others want the money to be spent on reducing demand for power in the first place by insulating homes. But societies and leaders are slowly becoming less concerned about nuclear disasters and other environmental impacts, and much more worried about climate change and reliable energy supplies - as crystallised by the 2022 energy crisis and recent mass power outage in Spain and Portugal.
Times
09-06-2025
- Business
- Times
Taxpayer to spend billions more on Sizewell C nuclear plant
Ministers have agreed to take a £17.8 billion stake in the Sizewell C nuclear power plant in a move that they claim will reduce carbon emissions and even make money for the taxpayer. Under plans announced by Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, the government will increase its investment in the project by £14.2 billion over the next three years on top of £3.6 billion of public money committed under the Conservatives. Further funding will come from the French energy group EDF, which is building the plant, as well as private infrastructure investors. Whitehall sources said ministers decided to take a larger stake because they were confident it would provide a significant return to the taxpayer. Under the funding model, investors carry all the risk of cost overruns but are paid back through consumer bills and can make more money if the project comes in on time and on budget. A plant with the same design being built by EDF at Hinkley Point has run billions of pounds over budget and is not expected to open before the early 2030s, more than five years late. The company said it had learnt lessons from Hinkley, in Somerset, and can build Sizewell C, in Suffolk, faster and more cheaply. However, it is still likely to cost much more than the estimated £20 billion in 2020 and will not produce power for at least another decade. The total cost will be set out this summer when external private investors are announced. Ultimately, the project will be paid for via consumers' electricity bills, adding about £1 a month to the cost of power over the 60-year lifespan of the plant. The announcement is among investments in nuclear at the spending review as part of the government's pledge to decarbonise electricity supplies and cope with growing demand. The Stop Sizewell C campaign group claimed that the government had not been honest about the full cost of the project ALAMY Ministers will also set out proposals to kick-start a generation of small modular reactors that supporters claim can be built faster and more cheaply than traditional plants. The government is expected to back a design developed by Rolls-Royce. Sources said the total government investment would be in the low billions of pounds. There will also be £2.5 billion for research and development into fusion energy to unlock the technology on a commercial scale. The new money will be seen as a win for Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, who fought with the Treasury for significant capital investment in the government's clean energy goal. The development comes despite concerns in government about the financial and political cost of net zeroas both the Tories and Reform are pledging to rethink the UK's climate pledges. Miliband said that it showed the government would 'not accept the status quo of failing to invest in the future and energy insecurity for our country', adding: 'We need new nuclear to deliver a golden age of clean energy abundance. That is the only way to protect family finances, take back control of our energy and tackle the climate crisis.' • We're standing behind net zero despite the sceptics Trade unions welcomed the move, which the Treasury said would go towards creating 10,000 jobs, including 1,500 apprenticeships. The GMB union said it was 'momentous'. Warren Kenny, the regional secretary, said: 'Sizewell C will provide thousands of good, skilled, unionised jobs and we look forward to … help secure a greener future.' Alison Downes, of Stop Sizewell C, the campaign group, said ministers had not 'come clean' about the full cost of the project, which the group previously estimated could be as much as £40 billion. '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, like Hinkley C? 'Ministers have still not come clean about Sizewell C's cost … Starmer and Reeves have signed up to HS2 mark 2.'
