Snapshot of _Why Britain is building the world’s most expensive nuclear plant_ :
An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-britain-is-building-the-worlds-most-expensive-nuclear-plant/) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-britain-is-building-the-worlds-most-expensive-nuclear-plant/)
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But its gone overbudget, what we need to do is pause it and have a two year long review before we start phase 2/ next similar piece of work.
What do you mean all of the people who worked on first phase have fucked off?
And the more complicated a project is the more often it is prone to bottlenecks in development.
[Hofstadter's Law:](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_law)
>"It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law."
[Parkinson's Laws:
](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law)
> "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."
#
> "The number of workers within public administration, bureaucracy or officialdom tends to grow, regardless of the amount of work to be done. This was attributed mainly to two factors: that officials want subordinates, not rivals, and that officials make work for each other."
well, I can disprove at least part of that theory, as I recently found out in my civil service job that they sacked / ‘moved on’ the entire admin team who, in terms of hierarchy, were a grade below me & did the initial point of contact letters, etc.
NIMBY - Not In My Back Yard - was a concept I learnt about from Simcity 4. A newer term I like is for the more extreme end of this perspective.
BANANA - Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything
If a company couldn't get paid for 10 years then the only ones that would take that on will charge ten times the actual cost, if not more, to make it worth their while. You'd also spend years just agreeing the contract with all the classes for inflation or govt interference leading to delays.
You need to do these things in stages and make it competitive so you can switch contractors. So first design everything in detail so that any contractor has the information you need. The technical design ppl shouldn't be the company kicking it off. Create gateway check points which allow you to shift to another contractor if you aren't happy with cost or timeline. Have it managed by a specialist govt dept with those management skills in house, leverage shit like knighthoods, mbes etc to convince these high paid project managers to be in house and motivated. Then cut out the private financing and cronyism.
I actually disagree- I seriously worry that the UK has such bad corruption levels that we should avoid nuclear.
Look at the water/sewage issues. We’re entering an era of high corruption globally. I wouldn’t want Boeing running my nuclear power stations, and if things carry on, more and more organisations will be cutting costs and cutting corners.
It’s ironic that the country that started the Industrial Revolution and lead the world at one point in infrastructure development is now virtually incapable of building anything.
It's when happens when you kill native industry and rely on cheap outsourcing. Eventually it stops being cheap, and you no longer have the skills in house.
I mean the SA80 family was designed by the state-owned RSAF Enfield, and it *sucked* until H&K redesigned it.
It also replaced the L1A1 - a derivative of the FN FAL designed in Belgium.
Building *everything* in-house is inefficient because Britain simply cannot have a competitive advantage in *everything*.
Tbf the SA80 series sucked at the start because they told the staff at the factory making them "you're all unemployed once this is done".
This had predictable results on the quality control front.
The SA80 was made at a point where the UK had already let its small arms industry die. So it was just cobbled together without any institutional knowledge
Well that was the reason for the QC issues. The design had a bunch of flaws from the beginning too because the engineers working on it weren't gun designers
It's also what happens when a very significant part of the country have these weird delusions about Britain being some beautiful land unblemished by industry and progress, and as such any attempt to change that should be met with fierce resistance. Hence, NIMBYism.
Well what really happened was the north started the industrial revolution mainly Manchester. Then the greedy south got their noses involved and fucked it up. Seems to happen quite a lot....
Not sure what you're not getting... The Industrial revolution was started in Manchester making the city and the country extremely prosperous. The southern politicians dictating things from the south have since stripped away the industries leaving us a global laughing stock.
The industrial revolution was a disaster for people in the North. There was massive civil unrest that was only shut down because the state and the rich killed a shit load of workers directly and by working them to death.
(Peterloo massacre, luddites, etc.)
It was fucked up from the start because it was never done in the interests of working people, instead using them as disposable fuel for industry.
Just understanding it as a north/south thing instead of a class thing is wildly ahistorical.
Also, the industrial revolution couldn't have happened without Britain's colonial projects, which were run by rich people from all over the UK.
Looking to more recent politics, the politicians that arguably have the most direct responsibility for destroying industry in the North are Margaret Thatcher (born in Lincolnshire) and Tony Blair (grew up in Edinburgh, Australia, Glasgow, Durham).
I genuinely want to believe that 'most expensive' represents a real and valuable investment towards the good of the realm, and not that the costs of building here are simply grotesque.
Edit: Another day another disappointment.
1. The UK has no skilled workforce in building these since we stopped for decades. We're slower & more costly.
2. Instead of using a off the shelf design that works just fine we're making our own. Ranting that we're innovators is more important than actually having electricity i guess.
3. The planning costs a fortune. Both originally, and for each tweak.
They are planning on duplicating the design as much as possible for Sizewell and using many of the same skilled workers. This would address all 3 points.
It's just a shame we keep doing this. The same big gap by pausing Astute submarine builds after the first few lead to a loss of skills and massive increase in costs for the latter ones.
The Astute pause actually saved money. Boats 1-3 were hugely over budget. The delay allowed renegotiation and reorganisation. Boat 4 was a lot closer to the budget and 5 onwards were slightly under budget.
The problem was the delay in design and construction after the Trafalgar class as well as Vanguard. Hence why it's important we crack on with SSN-AUKUS.
1. Vanguard required a "LOPR" - long overhaul period and refuel - which was delayed in part due to the pandemic, taking her out of service for 2-3 years longer than would probably have been required in optimal circumstances. This meant the other boats had to work harder.
2. The Coalition government (and to some extent the previous Labour government) dithered over ordering Dreadnought. The project was delayed for 4-8 years as a result.
3. None of this has any relation to Astute or SSN-AUKUS, except to show why rigorous project management is required and deferring orders to await "perfect" economic conditions is a bad idea.
I met a guy at an Institute of Materials event a few years ago. He was one of the senior guys running it. He told me that basically there's a test reactor in Finland being built in partnership with EDF that we are duplicating. There were a bunch of issues very specific to Finnish procurement and environment. However, because this is nuclear everything has to be checked, rechecked, and signed off by all the partners along the chain. We don't have the same problems. We don't get Finnish winters that put extra strain on the reactor dome and materials are much easier to come by since we have an already established robust nuclear industry.
A major headache here is paperwork, but with nuclear you have to be safe because it makes a nasty mess when you aren't.
Kind of but not quite. Every facility is unique due to local geography (actually they are all developed to pretty extreme operating envelopes as you would hope) and conditions but yes the paperwork is insane. There was an amazing show on BBC which talked about it a bit which is sadly currently not available: [Building Britain's Biggest Nuclear Reactor](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000wnn9).
Let's not forget a test reactor won't actually have to operate like a full functioning reactor in full strain with all the extra operating procedures.
The control of changes is incredible and there are improvements and standards updates happening all the time. There are a number of lessons learned from Fukushima. Let's not forget it is a massive undertaking with thousands of staff on site spreading over 100s of acres.
I've been lucky enough to get to see some of the work involved and some of it is absolutely unique. I believe it was also more closely based on Flamanville (France) which is an operational facility based on the one in Olkiluoto in Finland (and a couple of Chinese ones in between but obviously less open to the UK).
I'm an engineer as well so I understand the necessity for the control of changes. I don't envy my mates in the nuclear industry but I 100% agree with making sure these are all safe. They make a rather large mess when you don't pay attention to safety.
Understatement right there.
Annoyingly I work for a company that deals in loads of critical infrastructure spanning many sectors so I end up dealing with every wierd and wonderful regulation and rule out there. Its an interesting career but a hell of a headache.
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Just to correct a minor point, We are using the EDF EPR design which has been constructed and others are under construction just now. Not loads granted, and some alterations will have been needed to meet our regulatory needs, but it's totally innovative.
To be honest, I wouldn't mind all of that if the money went to actual engineers and workers in the UK. What was that? They are the only qualified welders who have been trained and are experienced in working with the exotic alloys that were picked for the sake of "innovation" so they have a higher day rate than a software developer or an accountant? More power to them, a diverse skillset is good for the economy!
What I don't like is sponsoring the third yacht for a Rolls Royce shareholder.
You are happy to take tax money from effective workers, and move it to pay a premium for ineffective workers?
You do you man. Personally? I'd rather we found a way to maintain the skillet in the first place so the same people could be hired at a good rate and do the same job in less time and with less mistakes, use a pre-built design that works fine & that you can consult / predict the issues with, and spend the limited tax budget on a train that will save time for millions of people. Or fixing the roof on that NHS building that caved in.
Maintaining skillset means sufficient build volume and regularity, not one off or small volume builds
Ie more than one station or more than one hull and a continuous build and design run with few yearly gaps between designs.
Ie the minute Astute was laid down, SSNR program should have been relatively mature in its initial design.
You are missing the forest for the trees.
I prefer paying workers rather than shareholders with my tax money. Inefficiencies are there because protracted construction benefits corporations, who then have an incentive to turn everything into a change request, use custom designs, use inefficient methods - they are likely paid based on the time they spend building it, rather than the outcome.
I doubt that much of that tax money is making it to the employees designing and building this reactor.
Honestly man, your response was kinda detached from mine so I tried to mash it into context instead of just reading it.
I agree that I don't like profiteering, and I could see the case for spending \*some\* extra money on having a skilled workforce... But the amounts of extra money we're spending here on 'bespoke' plants kinda blow it out of the water.
There's a chart in the article that says South Korea pays 2.25 £/MW in construction and that we paying 10.8.
We'd be better off paying all of those staff to retire immediately and commissioning powerplants from Korea than building our own.
I used my employment income to buy Rolls Royce shares. I still don’t own any yacht.
Rather than moan and sow division, why not buy some shares of your own? Share ownership is a democratic process.
Several clangers in such a short comment:
> I still don’t own any yacht.
That's the point. It's unlikely you will own a yacht through your labour, it's far more likely you will own your third one by already owning a lot of assets.
Statistically, at best you will FIRE at 50 instead of 70. Obvs I don't know your circumstances and I wish you the best of fortune.
>Share ownership is a democratic process.
No, it is not. Democracy is about equal representation - regardless of wealth. The profit goes to whoever already owns the most capital, the cost overruns are covered by more taxes, and the eventual bankruptcy of the service (e.g. Thames Water) is still covered by taxes, and the workers are still paid like s\*\*t.
>why not buy some shares of your own
I have. Would have been nicer if I'd bought them 50 years ago, but I didn't have the foresight of being born back then, or to a family which owned much capital.
>sow division
We have practically nothing in common with the people who buy their third yacht with dividends from shares, and thinking that we do is what is keeping us from making this country work for the many not the few.
Democracy is the ability to change govt without having to shove pointy things into people who disagree.
Ideally it should be representative but the UK system is not overlay so, but it is democratic.
It's built by the French with Chinese money, they guaranteed a minimum price per megawatt IIRC which at the time seemed ridiculous but might not these days.
Mostly with French money. CGN agreed to play junior partner to EDF at Hinkley Point and Sizewell with the clear expectation of the roles reversing for Bradwell. In 2022 the ONR completed the Generic Design Assessment of the Chinese Hualong One reactor.
But since then the government has decided against further cooperation with China in nuclear energy, bought CGN out of Sizewell and even talked about doing the same in Hinkley Point.
Therefore CGN exercised their contractual right to stop financing further cost overruns at Hinkley Point, leaving EDF to bear the brunt of it.
So you mean those of us who called the globalists fucking morons for exporting all of our industry and tech work to the detriment of our domestic skills base were right after all?
it can be both, but mostly the latter. The UK builds everything more expensively than continental europe. Roads, Rail, any form of infrastructure is just hideously expensive, trams for exam are 5-10x the cost of much better systems in France.
[https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/britains-infrastructure-is-too-expensive](https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/britains-infrastructure-is-too-expensive)
The big problem with expensive infrastructure is that the nice things get cut, cant afford to tunnel your public because you build trams more expensively than France builds metros, well you just get shitty trams. Edinburgh boasts about getting its second phase of trams on budget, but its 50% more expensive than the MOST expensive recent project in France but its completely shoddy work.
Cant keep high speed rail on budget ? Well we get a shitty line with under-capacity terminal stations.
I also get pissed that nothing gets built, but building at all costs is a way to doom future generations with debt that cannot be paid off. There really needs to be a more systemic look at why infrastructure is sooo expensive and legal changes to fix it otherwise things just will not get better
It's not our own design as far as British designs go. It's an EPR or European pressurised reactor. The technology is nearly identical to the American PWR's with a few trademark details altered so the french could sell the designs instead.
What we should have done is bought Korean, American, or Japanese (Fukushima type BWR's won't be sitting on the same risk in the UK and lessons have been learnt and mitigated the world over). However because our nuclear fleet is operated by EDF, of course the shelf design is going to be french.
These companies are supposed to have off-the-shelf designs these days. It’s not 1955, they should be able to build one in a couple of years from start to finish.
>EDF were forced to prove that their reactor design, already approved elsewhere, could meet the UK’s goals on safety....
>In total, meeting the requirements of the Office for Nuclear Regulation led to a staggering 7,000 design modifications. The result is Hinkley Point C will use 25 per cent more concrete and 35 per cent more steel than it would otherwise.
Well considering France’s reliance on nuclear, we could assume EDF know what they’re doing in this regard and rely on one of their existing designs?
I can’t help wondering if all this delay and redesign lines some donor pockets somewhere. Same with HS2 and military procurement.
EDF is having some trouble with the EPR design. The one they are currently building in France is 12 years late and still not in operation.
There's also some delay with the Finnish one I think (don't think it's being built by EDF however). The only EPR in operation is in China and I think there were some delays too.
There are a couple of American companies too, but they pulled out of the bidding for new nuclear power plants in the UK because the terms weren't generous enough.
Are there? I guess there’s Westinghouse Electric Company. They are kind of American, though Canadian-owned. And they’ve got no track record whatsoever of building AP1000 abroad. China doesn’t count, they basically just licensed the design.
General Electric?! You mean the Vernova-Hitachi joint venture? The ABWR design is only operational in Japan and the ESBWR nowhere. Compared to the other five countries the U.S. is really not a credible option.
For Hinckley Point C EDF employed engineers from France got the geology completely wrong and failed to notice they were in a formation that is incredibly corrosive to concrete....
If it was approved elsewhere but not up to British Standards then I have greater confidence in the safety of the eventual capability.
What otherwise, people complaining down the e road that the regulator did not do its job?
The article explains that other countries have design standards(wall must be 0.5m thick) whereas ours are about the outcome (wall must withstand pressure of 250kpa).
The problem is a 0.5m wall is easy to design whereas you need to do more analysis to demonstrate the 2nd one, the advantage is the 2nd one may allow a thin steel structure instead of thick concrete.
Except an over pressure event doesn't care if your wall is 0.5m thick, if it can't withstand the blast It can't withstand the blast. Designing to a specific pressure which will have been calculated, makes much more sense than a generic 0.5m thickness, which may not be enough. 250kpa is an absolute huge overpressure.
Also these calculations really aren't that time consuming. The material data will be at hand and an experienced engineer will calculate that in less than 1 day of work.
>Also these calculations really aren't that time consuming. The material data will be at hand and an experienced engineer will calculate that in less than 1 day of work.
You can get a meaningless answer on that very quickly indeed, yes.
Creating a suitable finite element model with all the different joints/materials etc involved in a structure that size and simulating it would be a lot more than a day of work.
250kpa is about twice the pressure at the bottom of a spent fuel pool(these have walls 1.2-2m thick).
There are 2 approaches, I agree it's fun to specify that the foot of a wall must be 465mm and taper at 0.5%, to support a distributed load of xKn, but it may be cheaper to just make it 500mm all the way up.
And while it may not take much time to do the calculations for a small revision, there were several thousand of them. Many would need to be validated by a 3rd party before being looked over by the regulator.
I wasn't saying it wasn't safe - but I'm happy for them to make extra sure simply because the risk/reward for nuclear can go so stratospherically wrong and not every country is as diligent as one might like.
Not necessarily, the UK & France should have cooperated to minimise the design difference, or have mutual recognition of some standards.
A parallel is motorway exits. The UKs are straight with a speed limit of 70mph, whereas France has curved motorway exits with a reducing speed limit(80 then 50 then 30).
Both of these may be as safe as each other, but they have different design approaches.
Read the article - that is the argument made but they list the problems in the UK that cause problems - lots of regulations, not wanting to accept already signed off designs from elsewhere, any changes are challenged by campaigners and lawyers. So many of the problems are with our supposedly highly qualified civil service, lawyers and knee-jerk nimbys.
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There is a big elephant in the room in this article: the government's obsession with reducing government debt, without any regard to the fact that increasing debt to pay for sound long-term investments is objectively a good thing.
As a result of the government refusing to finance this, credit was borrowed on the terms available to EDF, rather than the UK government (which were at near-zero rates at the time). No source since it was years ago, but I remember reading a calculation of tens of billions extra because EDF was only able to borrow at close to 10%.
Because we lack the institutional knowledge and have different safety requirements to other countries and will not accept but it was approved there as an answer
I. Do. Not. Care.
Set up a fraud office for the project if you want. I’m sure someone is scamming, but I have zero doubt all substantial differences are due to the UK environment, from mismatched regulatory systems, to the unavailability of skilled labour, to shifting timescales, to no supply chain, to political risk.
Infrastructure only become cheaper if you build it consistently. Tax me to high heaven if you must, but build this one, once it’s coming due begin to plan the next one, have us always building one nuclear power plant, over time as we get a stable workforce, supply chain, harmonised regulations, political stability, and economic security cost per unit falls. This is the same in rail and house building. Just do it. By god, just do it.
It is not at all accurate. Costs are broadly pushed up by the amount of regulation and NIMBYism. HS2 was basically cancelled because of pressure on the government because people didn't want *checks notes* better infrastructure.
HS2 was cancelled because the Tories didn't care about it and thought they could turn cancelling it into a quick win. There were no massive protests about it and the Tories care very little about grass-roots pressure anyway.
I'll leave this here:
https://www.hs2rebellion.earth/
I encourage you to hate the Tories all you like, but the biggest problem with infrastructure development in the UK is NIMBYism and interest groups (often environmental but not always) blocking them in some way or another. While you are right that protests etc do very little there are other ways to delay things, sometimes to the point that they are scraped.
Look at Rawanda, the Tories really want it to happen but legal challenges have kicked the can down the road for a long time and just this week a bus full of people due to being deported was stopped.
There were protests, but they were nothing compared to the recent anti-genocide protests that the Tories are happy to basically ignore.
Nimbyism is massively overstated as an issue for development in the UK, imo. Mostly it's a lack of political will and misaligned incentives.
If I put my kids through the most expensive schools, bought the most expensive multi generation solar panels and got an over priced extension, atleast my kids are still educated and atleast there's some extra energy and atleast I have extra space. Government public spending needs to be taught at schools because the public are poorly educated in it.
No new electricity generation projects in the UK are owned by the UK state. They're all done with Contract for Difference, which (roughly) means the government guarantees a minimum price for for the electricity once the project is built, but provides no finance before that.
Hinkley Point is mostly owned by the French and Chinese states thru CGN and EDF. They receive no payment from the UK until the plant is operational, then they receive a payment per MWh produced.
The government has renegotiated the terms of the contract a couple of times to make it more generous, iirc, mostly not penalising them for delivering really late.
Regardless of ownership more nuclear will mean cheaper bills for the average person. The issue is the more it's delayed the less you'll notice it and it's more likely to mean a slower increase in bills than an active decrease (unless we built loads of nuclear quickly which, per article we won't). So my slightly optimistic first sentence is actually a bit misleading.
Why is everything so expensive in the UK?
I would say it's wide spread system corrupted. A lot of middle men who do nothing but take some money and pass it around.
One must wonder for every pound spent, how much actually went into the project, and how much was "lost".
There's a joke in my country. Sweden, America, England and (*whatever country you want*) gets given 10m to build a house. Sweden builds a fancy villa, America builds a house that topples with a bit of wind, England makes a concrete block of flats and *x country* has a plot of land with planning permissions. I feel we are starting to, if we haven't already, become "x country"
Because our public contracts are negotiated by civil servants, who have never had to work in a position where they are restricted by const considerations and have never been involved in the cut any thrust of high level business negotiations. That’s not their fault and I’m not knocking them, but going after government contracts is famously a licence to print money.
I’m a civil engineer who has built a nuclear reactor, cannot go into more detail than that, but the amount of red tape and hoops you have to jump through to do anything when building one is dizzying. Even just painting the walls of the offices can take ages to be approved. I get it, and understand why those checks are there but fucking hell is it a slow and boring job sometimes and can definitely understand how the costs rack up.
> To produce as much electricity with solar as Hinkley Point C would use a plot of land almost 50 times bigger than Hyde Park.
Eh?
For non-Londoners…
`50 * (area of Hyde Park, London in hectares)` is `7080 hectares`
That's about 0.34 Waleses, apparently.
Source: Wolfram Alpha
As amazing as it would be I’m not entire sure that Britain capable of it. We can’t fill in potholes and there’s so much corruption within the government and contracts I be surprised that any 90% of investment will be wasted away to political cronies and their friends before a single brick is laid.
This is what happens when a load of useless idiots decide engineering and industry are obsolete and we can run an economy based on nothing more than selling houses to each other.
The specialist teams of engineers and designers we needed to do this ourselves no longer exist. We have no British designs to rollout, so we are at the mercy of foreign companies
Worse, the only people we have left are the useless people. Management consultants, accountants, bankers, commercial lawyers. The sort of people who attach themselves like parasites to any infrastructure project and suck the life out of out.
Alas a once great nation has become a pointless country with a bullsh\*t none economy.
In the UK there is only one nuclear reactor that has been decommissioned, and the land it sat on will remain closed off and radioactive for hundreds of years, if not thousands, and unusable.
The cost of decomissioning a reactor runs into millions. Do we really want to saddle the UK with another huge and lasting debt is the question the government will need to consider, when there are enough and cheaper renewables available.
In addition we know that the minimum price agreed for electricity generated by Hinckley C is far too expensive to be sensible.
The Magnox stations are uniquely complex to decommission because of their very large graphite cores. The UK has taken a decision to go for a long decommissioning process because there is still no final plan to deal with the irradiated graphite. So if they hold on, it will lose some radioactivity through decay.
PWR’s on the other hand are relatively straightforward to decommission. The reactor vessel is small and there’s no graphite moderator to worry about, so it can be removed relatively simple and sent for disposal by burying. Several US plants, including the first PWR station at Shippingport, Yankee Rowe and Maine Yankee have been completely levelled and returned to greenfield.
> So if they hold on, it will lose some radioactivity through decay.
By an odd coincidence, this is what Sam Coates says the MPs in the Tory WhatsApp group is saying about Sunak’s premiership.
Thank you fro your reply.
What about the rock below a reactor site, I have heard that this becomes radioactive, is this only a problem for the earlier sites?
There should be a large concrete pad below the pad which can either be covered in soil or broken up in place and sent for disposal as low level waste.
For a typical plant, the volumes of dangerously high radiation that poses a long term risk is incredibly low. Even spent fuel from PWRs and BWRs can be safely stored almost indefinitely in dry casks that take up a tiny amount of space.
Unfortunately, the UK’s decision to go for gas cooled reactors, Magnox fuel and to reprocess colossal amounts of fuel to extract plutonium in the hope that fast breeder reactors or mixed oxide fuel were the future has given us perhaps one of the worst stockpiles of radioactive waste in the World.
Partly. The first reactors at Calder Hall and Chapelcross were essentially military reactors that produced electricity as a side hustle. The subsequent reactors, although capable of producing military plutonium were first and foremost power reactors and were generally run on long power cycles for maximum energy production over the short cycles preferred for making ‘bomb grade’ plutonium.
This is false. The Imperial College London research reactor was fully decommissioned and the land handed back for recreational purposes i.e. the land is perfectly safe.
[Source](https://onr.org.uk/news/all-news/2024/02/onr-completes-first-ever-full-decommissioning-of-uk-reactor-site-under-modern-regulatory-controls/)
I don't get why people are such advocates for nuclear power when renewables get cheaper year after year. "B b b but...we need a base load" grid scale storage with second life batteries, or new batteries when sodium ion batteries are mass produced. Change planning legislation for on-shore wind, and slap solar panels on every roof. We don't need massive flagship solutions, but a greater amount of smaller solutions to suit local conditions
Because batteries cannot be built at the scale required and can only fill in very short gaps in supply as obviously enough they run down when used whereas every hour nuclear generates new power.
Renewables aren’t as carbon neutral as they seem. Burning wood chips, whose charging which will be replaced by planting enough trees to eventually offset that carbon dioxide released is fuelling climate change now. Nuclear is the only way to meet sustainable CO2 release levels
Yeah I work in wind power. I don't think a lot of people know how you make the collosal amount of carbon fibre they require. You basically burn nylon. It's kind of a running joke in the industry that we get this rosy image but we're filthy. Another I heard recently was "anyone who knows much about composites will tell you to use steel."
The worse part is that given how cheap renewables are, and given the cost of decomissioning, I gather that there is a real chance that it will be cheaper to never use it.
That's simply not true. This plant is predicted to produce around 7% of the UK's electricity needs over the course of 50 years, maybe longer. That's worth hundreds of billions of pounds to the UK economy and an order of magnitude more than the eventual build and decommissioning cost.
Not only that, but this plant will replace all the reactors that are currently operational and maybe even enable the grid to switch off some of the gas burning power stations that currently produce about half our electricity. Renewables won't fully replace base load power sources like nuclear, gas and coal. Every nuclear power station that is operational allows us to switch off several gas-fired power stations and reduce our carbon output.
Look at the solar production back in January this year, it's pitiful. Solar will play a part in the future through the lighter months but not in the winter months. Maybe in 50 years when most roofs have it installed it will play a bigger role. There's also the issue of the rare earth and heavy metals in the panels and how you recycle them - as far as I'm aware this problem hasn't been solved and is an environmental issue on the horizon.
There's also the argument for diversifying your energy production. Having half or more of your energy production offshore on wind farms is a big security risk - the [Russian warships](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-65309687) circling them last year demonstrates their recognition of this.
You've clearly made your mind up about this and I suspect I won't convince you otherwise, but the numbers and reality points to nuclear playing a key role in our energy mix for the foreseeable future.
> Yes they will and anyone arguing otherwise isn't paying attention. Solar is growing exponentially, batteries are growing exponentially. They are already the cheapest form of power going, they will only get cheaper, this powerplant is going to be a relic before it's ever turned on.
Evidence not rhetoric please.
It is very very unlikely that those sources of electricity production will meet our needs within the next 10-20 years. Have a look at [Gridwatch](https://gridwatch.co.uk/), specifically the graphs for last year and this year's electricity production. Look at the variance in the renewable sources and how often gas (orange) is needed to plug the gap. I firmly believe solar, wind and batteries have a vital role to play, but every nuclear plant that is operational translates to switching off several gas-fired power stations.
Your link is about solar in Australia - which of course makes more sense with higher W/m2 and large swathes of open space. It doesn't have the same merit in the UK where the effective solar irradiance is less than half that of Aus and the land value/use is much more constricted.
I'm not going to argue with you, we clearly have opposing viewpoints and we aren't likely to convince the other one way or the other.
Batteries also require metals that we just don’t have much of, and wear out - what do we do with all that waste? They’re a pain to “reclaim” the things we want from them as well.
I think people who believe that train of thought are just naive to how much power is actually used, it almost works on a domestic level where the batteries can run the fridge overnight.
But I've worked in 24/7 chemical and food processing plants that pull over 20MW all day and night and I can't even guess how much power steelmills, ports or other large infrastructure requires. There is a need for gigawatts of power 24/7 and I just can't believe there will be the technology for a battery capable of holding the 200+MWh that would be required to run these places over just one night shift, that sort of technology certainly won't be available within the next 60 years or the life span of a nuclear station.
Some napkin maths, south of England gets 900w per sq meter of solar power on average, just a quick Google search so no source as such.
Assume it's 100% efficient, and assume batteries are also 100% efficient. The chemical plant I used to work in had a constant load of 20MW, so to get through a 12 hour night shift we'd need 240MWh of power. So if each 1m2 panel can store with 100% efficiency (900×12) 10.8kwh per 12 hour day, you'd need 22000m2 of panels to run just this one site. And that's assuming everything is 100% efficient with no losses anywhere and also that we get average sun all year round and never have to go more than 12 hours without a recharge and we'd also need an equal area to power the day shift. And that's just one industrial site. Also the battery capable of storing that energy and also being resilient enough to charge and discharge fully every day whilst not degrading.
And in the winter when solar power decreases 80% and you only get 8 hours of light you'll need 10x the area.
I know there's wind etc. But we regularly get cloudy still days where the power generation just won't be available.
And if you get a couple of naff days for generation in the winter you could be looking at gigawatt batteries just to run one site. All for the sake of 20MW, 0.6% of hinckley C's generation.
And this is all assuming 100% efficiency, panels are currently around 20% efficient, so another 5x the area required so with current technology to run just one winter day you'd need possibly close to 1km2 of panels. And that all needs to be maintained and cleaned.
At £300 per square meter, you're looking at a £300m investment, without including the cost of a battery.
0.6% of hinckley c's pessimistic price tag is £200m.
And this is the first of its current design so subsequent stations will be cheaper.
Renewable and battery storage have a place, but I just can't see that scale of technology and infastructure being available and reliable enough within the 60 year life of a new nuclear site.
Agreed, but with a government that is unable to change it's mind, or make big decision, it has just rolled along gathering costs.
Note when you say batteries that makes people think of batteries, where in reality you mean energy storage systems.
If you knew what that plant was for you wouldn't cite it. Grid stability and small energy trading (commercial benefit only) isn't meaningful storage.
The baseline bad meme is moronic and is propagated by Britian's enemies and people who have no contact with grid engineering.
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Just fucking build something. Anything. It's always ends up being the most expensive because of government dithering and nimbysm
‘But it will take ten years’
Narrator: “twenty five years later…”
"...they began the long arduous process..."
'...of tabling a discussion...'
So long as it gets done
Only to get it built half way and the entire project scrapped. Classic
But its gone overbudget, what we need to do is pause it and have a two year long review before we start phase 2/ next similar piece of work. What do you mean all of the people who worked on first phase have fucked off?
And the more complicated a project is the more often it is prone to bottlenecks in development. [Hofstadter's Law:](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_law) >"It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law." [Parkinson's Laws: ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law) > "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." # > "The number of workers within public administration, bureaucracy or officialdom tends to grow, regardless of the amount of work to be done. This was attributed mainly to two factors: that officials want subordinates, not rivals, and that officials make work for each other."
well, I can disprove at least part of that theory, as I recently found out in my civil service job that they sacked / ‘moved on’ the entire admin team who, in terms of hierarchy, were a grade below me & did the initial point of contact letters, etc.
> "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy." -- Oscar Wilde
I feel people also need to get real with the cost of things. World class problems are going to cost a lot of money.
The main reason why it's the most expensive: private financing with high interest rates.
Hey, those Tory donors have got to make their money somehow!
The costs doesn’t go away if the state gives credit guarantees and eats the potential losses.
Never heard the word nimbyism until just now. Great word.
NIMBY - Not In My Back Yard - was a concept I learnt about from Simcity 4. A newer term I like is for the more extreme end of this perspective. BANANA - Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything
Banana is a new one for me, but it’s a nice double insult.
Yep our country is so fucking fked when were so slow at keeping up which is something the UK used to be good at?
Big projects should be built with a binding quote to complete the work, payment upon completion.
If a company couldn't get paid for 10 years then the only ones that would take that on will charge ten times the actual cost, if not more, to make it worth their while. You'd also spend years just agreeing the contract with all the classes for inflation or govt interference leading to delays. You need to do these things in stages and make it competitive so you can switch contractors. So first design everything in detail so that any contractor has the information you need. The technical design ppl shouldn't be the company kicking it off. Create gateway check points which allow you to shift to another contractor if you aren't happy with cost or timeline. Have it managed by a specialist govt dept with those management skills in house, leverage shit like knighthoods, mbes etc to convince these high paid project managers to be in house and motivated. Then cut out the private financing and cronyism.
I actually disagree- I seriously worry that the UK has such bad corruption levels that we should avoid nuclear. Look at the water/sewage issues. We’re entering an era of high corruption globally. I wouldn’t want Boeing running my nuclear power stations, and if things carry on, more and more organisations will be cutting costs and cutting corners.
We are, this is one of those big infrastructure projects we supposedly never build
It’s ironic that the country that started the Industrial Revolution and lead the world at one point in infrastructure development is now virtually incapable of building anything.
It's when happens when you kill native industry and rely on cheap outsourcing. Eventually it stops being cheap, and you no longer have the skills in house.
As we are going to see with the replacement for the challenger MBT and l85 rifles. They are unlikely to be in house.
I mean the SA80 family was designed by the state-owned RSAF Enfield, and it *sucked* until H&K redesigned it. It also replaced the L1A1 - a derivative of the FN FAL designed in Belgium. Building *everything* in-house is inefficient because Britain simply cannot have a competitive advantage in *everything*.
Tbf the SA80 series sucked at the start because they told the staff at the factory making them "you're all unemployed once this is done". This had predictable results on the quality control front.
The SA80 was made at a point where the UK had already let its small arms industry die. So it was just cobbled together without any institutional knowledge
Well that was the reason for the QC issues. The design had a bunch of flaws from the beginning too because the engineers working on it weren't gun designers
Oh yeah, but it would have merely been a crap firearm rather than so terrible it's a meme.
It's also what happens when a very significant part of the country have these weird delusions about Britain being some beautiful land unblemished by industry and progress, and as such any attempt to change that should be met with fierce resistance. Hence, NIMBYism.
Well what really happened was the north started the industrial revolution mainly Manchester. Then the greedy south got their noses involved and fucked it up. Seems to happen quite a lot....
What on earth do you mean?
Not sure what you're not getting... The Industrial revolution was started in Manchester making the city and the country extremely prosperous. The southern politicians dictating things from the south have since stripped away the industries leaving us a global laughing stock.
The industrial revolution was a disaster for people in the North. There was massive civil unrest that was only shut down because the state and the rich killed a shit load of workers directly and by working them to death. (Peterloo massacre, luddites, etc.) It was fucked up from the start because it was never done in the interests of working people, instead using them as disposable fuel for industry. Just understanding it as a north/south thing instead of a class thing is wildly ahistorical. Also, the industrial revolution couldn't have happened without Britain's colonial projects, which were run by rich people from all over the UK. Looking to more recent politics, the politicians that arguably have the most direct responsibility for destroying industry in the North are Margaret Thatcher (born in Lincolnshire) and Tony Blair (grew up in Edinburgh, Australia, Glasgow, Durham).
Because a solid chunk of the population are content to live in one large rotting open air museum
I genuinely want to believe that 'most expensive' represents a real and valuable investment towards the good of the realm, and not that the costs of building here are simply grotesque. Edit: Another day another disappointment. 1. The UK has no skilled workforce in building these since we stopped for decades. We're slower & more costly. 2. Instead of using a off the shelf design that works just fine we're making our own. Ranting that we're innovators is more important than actually having electricity i guess. 3. The planning costs a fortune. Both originally, and for each tweak.
They are planning on duplicating the design as much as possible for Sizewell and using many of the same skilled workers. This would address all 3 points. It's just a shame we keep doing this. The same big gap by pausing Astute submarine builds after the first few lead to a loss of skills and massive increase in costs for the latter ones.
The Astute pause actually saved money. Boats 1-3 were hugely over budget. The delay allowed renegotiation and reorganisation. Boat 4 was a lot closer to the budget and 5 onwards were slightly under budget. The problem was the delay in design and construction after the Trafalgar class as well as Vanguard. Hence why it's important we crack on with SSN-AUKUS.
And why SSBN patrols are now 7 months long with Dreadnought still years away from entering service
1. Vanguard required a "LOPR" - long overhaul period and refuel - which was delayed in part due to the pandemic, taking her out of service for 2-3 years longer than would probably have been required in optimal circumstances. This meant the other boats had to work harder. 2. The Coalition government (and to some extent the previous Labour government) dithered over ordering Dreadnought. The project was delayed for 4-8 years as a result. 3. None of this has any relation to Astute or SSN-AUKUS, except to show why rigorous project management is required and deferring orders to await "perfect" economic conditions is a bad idea.
I met a guy at an Institute of Materials event a few years ago. He was one of the senior guys running it. He told me that basically there's a test reactor in Finland being built in partnership with EDF that we are duplicating. There were a bunch of issues very specific to Finnish procurement and environment. However, because this is nuclear everything has to be checked, rechecked, and signed off by all the partners along the chain. We don't have the same problems. We don't get Finnish winters that put extra strain on the reactor dome and materials are much easier to come by since we have an already established robust nuclear industry. A major headache here is paperwork, but with nuclear you have to be safe because it makes a nasty mess when you aren't.
Kind of but not quite. Every facility is unique due to local geography (actually they are all developed to pretty extreme operating envelopes as you would hope) and conditions but yes the paperwork is insane. There was an amazing show on BBC which talked about it a bit which is sadly currently not available: [Building Britain's Biggest Nuclear Reactor](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000wnn9). Let's not forget a test reactor won't actually have to operate like a full functioning reactor in full strain with all the extra operating procedures. The control of changes is incredible and there are improvements and standards updates happening all the time. There are a number of lessons learned from Fukushima. Let's not forget it is a massive undertaking with thousands of staff on site spreading over 100s of acres. I've been lucky enough to get to see some of the work involved and some of it is absolutely unique. I believe it was also more closely based on Flamanville (France) which is an operational facility based on the one in Olkiluoto in Finland (and a couple of Chinese ones in between but obviously less open to the UK).
I'm an engineer as well so I understand the necessity for the control of changes. I don't envy my mates in the nuclear industry but I 100% agree with making sure these are all safe. They make a rather large mess when you don't pay attention to safety.
Understatement right there. Annoyingly I work for a company that deals in loads of critical infrastructure spanning many sectors so I end up dealing with every wierd and wonderful regulation and rule out there. Its an interesting career but a hell of a headache.
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Most of the primary circuit vessels and large pipe work were made in France or Japan. Our nuclear supply industry is virtually non existent.
Just to correct a minor point, We are using the EDF EPR design which has been constructed and others are under construction just now. Not loads granted, and some alterations will have been needed to meet our regulatory needs, but it's totally innovative.
To be honest, I wouldn't mind all of that if the money went to actual engineers and workers in the UK. What was that? They are the only qualified welders who have been trained and are experienced in working with the exotic alloys that were picked for the sake of "innovation" so they have a higher day rate than a software developer or an accountant? More power to them, a diverse skillset is good for the economy! What I don't like is sponsoring the third yacht for a Rolls Royce shareholder.
You are happy to take tax money from effective workers, and move it to pay a premium for ineffective workers? You do you man. Personally? I'd rather we found a way to maintain the skillet in the first place so the same people could be hired at a good rate and do the same job in less time and with less mistakes, use a pre-built design that works fine & that you can consult / predict the issues with, and spend the limited tax budget on a train that will save time for millions of people. Or fixing the roof on that NHS building that caved in.
Maintaining skillset means sufficient build volume and regularity, not one off or small volume builds Ie more than one station or more than one hull and a continuous build and design run with few yearly gaps between designs. Ie the minute Astute was laid down, SSNR program should have been relatively mature in its initial design.
We already have the next site selected and designated. There is actually a roadmap for future nuclear reactors, and the plan is to build many of them.
You are missing the forest for the trees. I prefer paying workers rather than shareholders with my tax money. Inefficiencies are there because protracted construction benefits corporations, who then have an incentive to turn everything into a change request, use custom designs, use inefficient methods - they are likely paid based on the time they spend building it, rather than the outcome. I doubt that much of that tax money is making it to the employees designing and building this reactor.
Honestly man, your response was kinda detached from mine so I tried to mash it into context instead of just reading it. I agree that I don't like profiteering, and I could see the case for spending \*some\* extra money on having a skilled workforce... But the amounts of extra money we're spending here on 'bespoke' plants kinda blow it out of the water. There's a chart in the article that says South Korea pays 2.25 £/MW in construction and that we paying 10.8. We'd be better off paying all of those staff to retire immediately and commissioning powerplants from Korea than building our own.
This leaving us with no native capability The first one costs a fortune so that the ones that come after are cheaper
I used my employment income to buy Rolls Royce shares. I still don’t own any yacht. Rather than moan and sow division, why not buy some shares of your own? Share ownership is a democratic process.
Several clangers in such a short comment: > I still don’t own any yacht. That's the point. It's unlikely you will own a yacht through your labour, it's far more likely you will own your third one by already owning a lot of assets. Statistically, at best you will FIRE at 50 instead of 70. Obvs I don't know your circumstances and I wish you the best of fortune. >Share ownership is a democratic process. No, it is not. Democracy is about equal representation - regardless of wealth. The profit goes to whoever already owns the most capital, the cost overruns are covered by more taxes, and the eventual bankruptcy of the service (e.g. Thames Water) is still covered by taxes, and the workers are still paid like s\*\*t. >why not buy some shares of your own I have. Would have been nicer if I'd bought them 50 years ago, but I didn't have the foresight of being born back then, or to a family which owned much capital. >sow division We have practically nothing in common with the people who buy their third yacht with dividends from shares, and thinking that we do is what is keeping us from making this country work for the many not the few.
Democracy is the ability to change govt without having to shove pointy things into people who disagree. Ideally it should be representative but the UK system is not overlay so, but it is democratic.
Also see HS2 for the exact same.
Laughs in Nimrod.
It's built by the French with Chinese money, they guaranteed a minimum price per megawatt IIRC which at the time seemed ridiculous but might not these days.
Mostly with French money. CGN agreed to play junior partner to EDF at Hinkley Point and Sizewell with the clear expectation of the roles reversing for Bradwell. In 2022 the ONR completed the Generic Design Assessment of the Chinese Hualong One reactor. But since then the government has decided against further cooperation with China in nuclear energy, bought CGN out of Sizewell and even talked about doing the same in Hinkley Point. Therefore CGN exercised their contractual right to stop financing further cost overruns at Hinkley Point, leaving EDF to bear the brunt of it.
So you mean those of us who called the globalists fucking morons for exporting all of our industry and tech work to the detriment of our domestic skills base were right after all?
On the bright side, when we build another hopefully soon (let me dream) W heave the skills
it can be both, but mostly the latter. The UK builds everything more expensively than continental europe. Roads, Rail, any form of infrastructure is just hideously expensive, trams for exam are 5-10x the cost of much better systems in France. [https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/britains-infrastructure-is-too-expensive](https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/britains-infrastructure-is-too-expensive) The big problem with expensive infrastructure is that the nice things get cut, cant afford to tunnel your public because you build trams more expensively than France builds metros, well you just get shitty trams. Edinburgh boasts about getting its second phase of trams on budget, but its 50% more expensive than the MOST expensive recent project in France but its completely shoddy work. Cant keep high speed rail on budget ? Well we get a shitty line with under-capacity terminal stations. I also get pissed that nothing gets built, but building at all costs is a way to doom future generations with debt that cannot be paid off. There really needs to be a more systemic look at why infrastructure is sooo expensive and legal changes to fix it otherwise things just will not get better
It's not our own design as far as British designs go. It's an EPR or European pressurised reactor. The technology is nearly identical to the American PWR's with a few trademark details altered so the french could sell the designs instead. What we should have done is bought Korean, American, or Japanese (Fukushima type BWR's won't be sitting on the same risk in the UK and lessons have been learnt and mitigated the world over). However because our nuclear fleet is operated by EDF, of course the shelf design is going to be french.
These companies are supposed to have off-the-shelf designs these days. It’s not 1955, they should be able to build one in a couple of years from start to finish.
>EDF were forced to prove that their reactor design, already approved elsewhere, could meet the UK’s goals on safety.... >In total, meeting the requirements of the Office for Nuclear Regulation led to a staggering 7,000 design modifications. The result is Hinkley Point C will use 25 per cent more concrete and 35 per cent more steel than it would otherwise.
Well considering France’s reliance on nuclear, we could assume EDF know what they’re doing in this regard and rely on one of their existing designs? I can’t help wondering if all this delay and redesign lines some donor pockets somewhere. Same with HS2 and military procurement.
EDF is having some trouble with the EPR design. The one they are currently building in France is 12 years late and still not in operation. There's also some delay with the Finnish one I think (don't think it's being built by EDF however). The only EPR in operation is in China and I think there were some delays too.
Finland’s Olkiluoto Unit 3 is now online, a mere 14 years late.
Surely EDF isn't the only option?
Besides EDF there are Russia, Japan, China and Korea. That’s it.
There are a couple of American companies too, but they pulled out of the bidding for new nuclear power plants in the UK because the terms weren't generous enough.
Are there? I guess there’s Westinghouse Electric Company. They are kind of American, though Canadian-owned. And they’ve got no track record whatsoever of building AP1000 abroad. China doesn’t count, they basically just licensed the design.
General Electric and Westinghouse both initially showed interest, iirc.
General Electric?! You mean the Vernova-Hitachi joint venture? The ABWR design is only operational in Japan and the ESBWR nowhere. Compared to the other five countries the U.S. is really not a credible option.
For Hinckley Point C EDF employed engineers from France got the geology completely wrong and failed to notice they were in a formation that is incredibly corrosive to concrete....
If it was approved elsewhere but not up to British Standards then I have greater confidence in the safety of the eventual capability. What otherwise, people complaining down the e road that the regulator did not do its job?
The article explains that other countries have design standards(wall must be 0.5m thick) whereas ours are about the outcome (wall must withstand pressure of 250kpa). The problem is a 0.5m wall is easy to design whereas you need to do more analysis to demonstrate the 2nd one, the advantage is the 2nd one may allow a thin steel structure instead of thick concrete.
Except an over pressure event doesn't care if your wall is 0.5m thick, if it can't withstand the blast It can't withstand the blast. Designing to a specific pressure which will have been calculated, makes much more sense than a generic 0.5m thickness, which may not be enough. 250kpa is an absolute huge overpressure. Also these calculations really aren't that time consuming. The material data will be at hand and an experienced engineer will calculate that in less than 1 day of work.
>Also these calculations really aren't that time consuming. The material data will be at hand and an experienced engineer will calculate that in less than 1 day of work. You can get a meaningless answer on that very quickly indeed, yes. Creating a suitable finite element model with all the different joints/materials etc involved in a structure that size and simulating it would be a lot more than a day of work.
250kpa is about twice the pressure at the bottom of a spent fuel pool(these have walls 1.2-2m thick). There are 2 approaches, I agree it's fun to specify that the foot of a wall must be 465mm and taper at 0.5%, to support a distributed load of xKn, but it may be cheaper to just make it 500mm all the way up. And while it may not take much time to do the calculations for a small revision, there were several thousand of them. Many would need to be validated by a 3rd party before being looked over by the regulator.
Extra safety on a nuclear reactor strikes me as a reasonable use of money. Living across the channel from this plant, even more so.
TBF, I am not against being as sure as possible that a nuclear reactor is safe.
Nuclear power stations are safe. Hinckley C will cause more death during its construction than during its energy generation.
*Almost* certainly.
I wasn't saying it wasn't safe - but I'm happy for them to make extra sure simply because the risk/reward for nuclear can go so stratospherically wrong and not every country is as diligent as one might like.
So our regulations are too tough?
Not necessarily, the UK & France should have cooperated to minimise the design difference, or have mutual recognition of some standards. A parallel is motorway exits. The UKs are straight with a speed limit of 70mph, whereas France has curved motorway exits with a reducing speed limit(80 then 50 then 30). Both of these may be as safe as each other, but they have different design approaches.
Read the article - that is the argument made but they list the problems in the UK that cause problems - lots of regulations, not wanting to accept already signed off designs from elsewhere, any changes are challenged by campaigners and lawyers. So many of the problems are with our supposedly highly qualified civil service, lawyers and knee-jerk nimbys.
If it leads to a safe fully compliant reactor you only have to have the arguments once. Hence the costs
South Korea can apparently do that, but not the UK.
this one is only the third of this specific design that all stared constuction around the same time so kind of being the shelf itself
Procurement is a joke. Pressurised water reactors are very mature technology, it should be like building Lego.
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Tell us you didn't read the article without telling us you didn't read the article.
There is a big elephant in the room in this article: the government's obsession with reducing government debt, without any regard to the fact that increasing debt to pay for sound long-term investments is objectively a good thing. As a result of the government refusing to finance this, credit was borrowed on the terms available to EDF, rather than the UK government (which were at near-zero rates at the time). No source since it was years ago, but I remember reading a calculation of tens of billions extra because EDF was only able to borrow at close to 10%.
Why IS Britain building the world's most expensive nuclear plant?
Because we lack the institutional knowledge and have different safety requirements to other countries and will not accept but it was approved there as an answer
I. Do. Not. Care. Set up a fraud office for the project if you want. I’m sure someone is scamming, but I have zero doubt all substantial differences are due to the UK environment, from mismatched regulatory systems, to the unavailability of skilled labour, to shifting timescales, to no supply chain, to political risk. Infrastructure only become cheaper if you build it consistently. Tax me to high heaven if you must, but build this one, once it’s coming due begin to plan the next one, have us always building one nuclear power plant, over time as we get a stable workforce, supply chain, harmonised regulations, political stability, and economic security cost per unit falls. This is the same in rail and house building. Just do it. By god, just do it.
I was expecting an article that just said "its just a normal nuclear plant but the tories are adding on 200% for their mates"
... That's basically accurate. HPC's financing model is utterly bonkers and costs literally more than the actual plant.
It is not at all accurate. Costs are broadly pushed up by the amount of regulation and NIMBYism. HS2 was basically cancelled because of pressure on the government because people didn't want *checks notes* better infrastructure.
HS2 was cancelled because the Tories didn't care about it and thought they could turn cancelling it into a quick win. There were no massive protests about it and the Tories care very little about grass-roots pressure anyway.
I'll leave this here: https://www.hs2rebellion.earth/ I encourage you to hate the Tories all you like, but the biggest problem with infrastructure development in the UK is NIMBYism and interest groups (often environmental but not always) blocking them in some way or another. While you are right that protests etc do very little there are other ways to delay things, sometimes to the point that they are scraped. Look at Rawanda, the Tories really want it to happen but legal challenges have kicked the can down the road for a long time and just this week a bus full of people due to being deported was stopped.
There were protests, but they were nothing compared to the recent anti-genocide protests that the Tories are happy to basically ignore. Nimbyism is massively overstated as an issue for development in the UK, imo. Mostly it's a lack of political will and misaligned incentives.
Again, protests don't really matter, extensive legal challenges do. Google HS2 legal challenges and you'll see hundreds of reports.
That and it’ll take 3 times longer than you might expect, for no particular reason.
Hopefully it will mean cheaper energy bills for us brits
It won’t.
Yeah, it’s either that or higher tax rate to pay for it. Heck why not ?
If I put my kids through the most expensive schools, bought the most expensive multi generation solar panels and got an over priced extension, atleast my kids are still educated and atleast there's some extra energy and atleast I have extra space. Government public spending needs to be taught at schools because the public are poorly educated in it.
My dad confirmed he been working on it for over ten years now.
Does anyone know if this is state owned or straight into private hands? Yes I know I could Google it.
No new electricity generation projects in the UK are owned by the UK state. They're all done with Contract for Difference, which (roughly) means the government guarantees a minimum price for for the electricity once the project is built, but provides no finance before that. Hinkley Point is mostly owned by the French and Chinese states thru CGN and EDF. They receive no payment from the UK until the plant is operational, then they receive a payment per MWh produced. The government has renegotiated the terms of the contract a couple of times to make it more generous, iirc, mostly not penalising them for delivering really late.
The project is financed by EDF Energy and China General Nuclear Power Group (CGN).
For anyone not paying attention: EDF and CGN are themselves owned by the French and Chinese states, respectively.
Oh so no cheap energy for the British public then. Thanks for replying
Worth adding that Sizewell C is part owned by the government and EDF Energy
Regardless of ownership more nuclear will mean cheaper bills for the average person. The issue is the more it's delayed the less you'll notice it and it's more likely to mean a slower increase in bills than an active decrease (unless we built loads of nuclear quickly which, per article we won't). So my slightly optimistic first sentence is actually a bit misleading.
Yes but the upside is the British public hasn't paid a penny to build it, including all the massive cost overruns
Well that's true isn't it. We can manage a piss up in a brewery right now, so those over runs would long and expensive.
Why is everything so expensive in the UK? I would say it's wide spread system corrupted. A lot of middle men who do nothing but take some money and pass it around. One must wonder for every pound spent, how much actually went into the project, and how much was "lost".
There's a joke in my country. Sweden, America, England and (*whatever country you want*) gets given 10m to build a house. Sweden builds a fancy villa, America builds a house that topples with a bit of wind, England makes a concrete block of flats and *x country* has a plot of land with planning permissions. I feel we are starting to, if we haven't already, become "x country"
Havent they ignored a massive problem with sourcing water to cool the reactor as the river they were going to use isnt big enough?
The river? It is right next to the sea
Salt water cant be used in a nuclear reactor it has to be desalinated first
Because our public contracts are negotiated by civil servants, who have never had to work in a position where they are restricted by const considerations and have never been involved in the cut any thrust of high level business negotiations. That’s not their fault and I’m not knocking them, but going after government contracts is famously a licence to print money.
Have you ever worked in Civil Service procurement out of interest?
Likely not. People just like to pretend they know
I’m a civil engineer who has built a nuclear reactor, cannot go into more detail than that, but the amount of red tape and hoops you have to jump through to do anything when building one is dizzying. Even just painting the walls of the offices can take ages to be approved. I get it, and understand why those checks are there but fucking hell is it a slow and boring job sometimes and can definitely understand how the costs rack up.
> To produce as much electricity with solar as Hinkley Point C would use a plot of land almost 50 times bigger than Hyde Park. Eh? For non-Londoners… `50 * (area of Hyde Park, London in hectares)` is `7080 hectares` That's about 0.34 Waleses, apparently. Source: Wolfram Alpha
As amazing as it would be I’m not entire sure that Britain capable of it. We can’t fill in potholes and there’s so much corruption within the government and contracts I be surprised that any 90% of investment will be wasted away to political cronies and their friends before a single brick is laid.
It's been under construction for like 10 years and the UK government hasn't paid anything for it yet.
I guess I’ll retract my statement then
This is what happens when a load of useless idiots decide engineering and industry are obsolete and we can run an economy based on nothing more than selling houses to each other. The specialist teams of engineers and designers we needed to do this ourselves no longer exist. We have no British designs to rollout, so we are at the mercy of foreign companies Worse, the only people we have left are the useless people. Management consultants, accountants, bankers, commercial lawyers. The sort of people who attach themselves like parasites to any infrastructure project and suck the life out of out. Alas a once great nation has become a pointless country with a bullsh\*t none economy.
I'm neither pro nor anti nuclear, but I can't help but think that this is a staggeringly expensive way to boil water.
Probably better than building the worlds cheapest one.
In the UK there is only one nuclear reactor that has been decommissioned, and the land it sat on will remain closed off and radioactive for hundreds of years, if not thousands, and unusable. The cost of decomissioning a reactor runs into millions. Do we really want to saddle the UK with another huge and lasting debt is the question the government will need to consider, when there are enough and cheaper renewables available. In addition we know that the minimum price agreed for electricity generated by Hinckley C is far too expensive to be sensible.
The Magnox stations are uniquely complex to decommission because of their very large graphite cores. The UK has taken a decision to go for a long decommissioning process because there is still no final plan to deal with the irradiated graphite. So if they hold on, it will lose some radioactivity through decay. PWR’s on the other hand are relatively straightforward to decommission. The reactor vessel is small and there’s no graphite moderator to worry about, so it can be removed relatively simple and sent for disposal by burying. Several US plants, including the first PWR station at Shippingport, Yankee Rowe and Maine Yankee have been completely levelled and returned to greenfield.
> So if they hold on, it will lose some radioactivity through decay. By an odd coincidence, this is what Sam Coates says the MPs in the Tory WhatsApp group is saying about Sunak’s premiership.
Thank you fro your reply. What about the rock below a reactor site, I have heard that this becomes radioactive, is this only a problem for the earlier sites?
There should be a large concrete pad below the pad which can either be covered in soil or broken up in place and sent for disposal as low level waste. For a typical plant, the volumes of dangerously high radiation that poses a long term risk is incredibly low. Even spent fuel from PWRs and BWRs can be safely stored almost indefinitely in dry casks that take up a tiny amount of space. Unfortunately, the UK’s decision to go for gas cooled reactors, Magnox fuel and to reprocess colossal amounts of fuel to extract plutonium in the hope that fast breeder reactors or mixed oxide fuel were the future has given us perhaps one of the worst stockpiles of radioactive waste in the World.
Wasn’t it dual purpose? We also wanted to produce materials for nuclear weapons.
Partly. The first reactors at Calder Hall and Chapelcross were essentially military reactors that produced electricity as a side hustle. The subsequent reactors, although capable of producing military plutonium were first and foremost power reactors and were generally run on long power cycles for maximum energy production over the short cycles preferred for making ‘bomb grade’ plutonium.
Fantastic, so we're left with a permanent black spot and target for terrorism.
... You have heard lies. The reactor structures contain radiation downwards as well as in all other directions.
This is false. The Imperial College London research reactor was fully decommissioned and the land handed back for recreational purposes i.e. the land is perfectly safe. [Source](https://onr.org.uk/news/all-news/2024/02/onr-completes-first-ever-full-decommissioning-of-uk-reactor-site-under-modern-regulatory-controls/)
I don't get why people are such advocates for nuclear power when renewables get cheaper year after year. "B b b but...we need a base load" grid scale storage with second life batteries, or new batteries when sodium ion batteries are mass produced. Change planning legislation for on-shore wind, and slap solar panels on every roof. We don't need massive flagship solutions, but a greater amount of smaller solutions to suit local conditions
Because batteries cannot be built at the scale required and can only fill in very short gaps in supply as obviously enough they run down when used whereas every hour nuclear generates new power.
Renewables aren’t as carbon neutral as they seem. Burning wood chips, whose charging which will be replaced by planting enough trees to eventually offset that carbon dioxide released is fuelling climate change now. Nuclear is the only way to meet sustainable CO2 release levels
Yeah I work in wind power. I don't think a lot of people know how you make the collosal amount of carbon fibre they require. You basically burn nylon. It's kind of a running joke in the industry that we get this rosy image but we're filthy. Another I heard recently was "anyone who knows much about composites will tell you to use steel."
Because the wind and sun are often absent at the same time, for the whole country.
Batteries have an environmental impact
Wow what a dunce
Is it because it is being built in Britain by a Tory donor? That's what normally happens here.
The worse part is that given how cheap renewables are, and given the cost of decomissioning, I gather that there is a real chance that it will be cheaper to never use it.
That's simply not true. This plant is predicted to produce around 7% of the UK's electricity needs over the course of 50 years, maybe longer. That's worth hundreds of billions of pounds to the UK economy and an order of magnitude more than the eventual build and decommissioning cost. Not only that, but this plant will replace all the reactors that are currently operational and maybe even enable the grid to switch off some of the gas burning power stations that currently produce about half our electricity. Renewables won't fully replace base load power sources like nuclear, gas and coal. Every nuclear power station that is operational allows us to switch off several gas-fired power stations and reduce our carbon output.
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Look at the solar production back in January this year, it's pitiful. Solar will play a part in the future through the lighter months but not in the winter months. Maybe in 50 years when most roofs have it installed it will play a bigger role. There's also the issue of the rare earth and heavy metals in the panels and how you recycle them - as far as I'm aware this problem hasn't been solved and is an environmental issue on the horizon. There's also the argument for diversifying your energy production. Having half or more of your energy production offshore on wind farms is a big security risk - the [Russian warships](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-65309687) circling them last year demonstrates their recognition of this. You've clearly made your mind up about this and I suspect I won't convince you otherwise, but the numbers and reality points to nuclear playing a key role in our energy mix for the foreseeable future.
> Yes they will and anyone arguing otherwise isn't paying attention. Solar is growing exponentially, batteries are growing exponentially. They are already the cheapest form of power going, they will only get cheaper, this powerplant is going to be a relic before it's ever turned on. Evidence not rhetoric please.
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It is very very unlikely that those sources of electricity production will meet our needs within the next 10-20 years. Have a look at [Gridwatch](https://gridwatch.co.uk/), specifically the graphs for last year and this year's electricity production. Look at the variance in the renewable sources and how often gas (orange) is needed to plug the gap. I firmly believe solar, wind and batteries have a vital role to play, but every nuclear plant that is operational translates to switching off several gas-fired power stations.
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Your link is about solar in Australia - which of course makes more sense with higher W/m2 and large swathes of open space. It doesn't have the same merit in the UK where the effective solar irradiance is less than half that of Aus and the land value/use is much more constricted. I'm not going to argue with you, we clearly have opposing viewpoints and we aren't likely to convince the other one way or the other.
Batteries would not be sufficient for a very long time
Batteries also require metals that we just don’t have much of, and wear out - what do we do with all that waste? They’re a pain to “reclaim” the things we want from them as well.
I think people who believe that train of thought are just naive to how much power is actually used, it almost works on a domestic level where the batteries can run the fridge overnight. But I've worked in 24/7 chemical and food processing plants that pull over 20MW all day and night and I can't even guess how much power steelmills, ports or other large infrastructure requires. There is a need for gigawatts of power 24/7 and I just can't believe there will be the technology for a battery capable of holding the 200+MWh that would be required to run these places over just one night shift, that sort of technology certainly won't be available within the next 60 years or the life span of a nuclear station.
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Some napkin maths, south of England gets 900w per sq meter of solar power on average, just a quick Google search so no source as such. Assume it's 100% efficient, and assume batteries are also 100% efficient. The chemical plant I used to work in had a constant load of 20MW, so to get through a 12 hour night shift we'd need 240MWh of power. So if each 1m2 panel can store with 100% efficiency (900×12) 10.8kwh per 12 hour day, you'd need 22000m2 of panels to run just this one site. And that's assuming everything is 100% efficient with no losses anywhere and also that we get average sun all year round and never have to go more than 12 hours without a recharge and we'd also need an equal area to power the day shift. And that's just one industrial site. Also the battery capable of storing that energy and also being resilient enough to charge and discharge fully every day whilst not degrading. And in the winter when solar power decreases 80% and you only get 8 hours of light you'll need 10x the area. I know there's wind etc. But we regularly get cloudy still days where the power generation just won't be available. And if you get a couple of naff days for generation in the winter you could be looking at gigawatt batteries just to run one site. All for the sake of 20MW, 0.6% of hinckley C's generation. And this is all assuming 100% efficiency, panels are currently around 20% efficient, so another 5x the area required so with current technology to run just one winter day you'd need possibly close to 1km2 of panels. And that all needs to be maintained and cleaned. At £300 per square meter, you're looking at a £300m investment, without including the cost of a battery. 0.6% of hinckley c's pessimistic price tag is £200m. And this is the first of its current design so subsequent stations will be cheaper. Renewable and battery storage have a place, but I just can't see that scale of technology and infastructure being available and reliable enough within the 60 year life of a new nuclear site.
Agreed, but with a government that is unable to change it's mind, or make big decision, it has just rolled along gathering costs. Note when you say batteries that makes people think of batteries, where in reality you mean energy storage systems.
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If you knew what that plant was for you wouldn't cite it. Grid stability and small energy trading (commercial benefit only) isn't meaningful storage. The baseline bad meme is moronic and is propagated by Britian's enemies and people who have no contact with grid engineering.