Ed Miliband is set to commit more than £14 billion of public money to a nuclear power renaissance in a bid to avert blackouts as Net Zero approaches. The Telegraph has more.
The Energy Secretary will on Tuesday commit £14.2 billion to building two giant reactors at Sizewell, Suffolk, capable of providing six million homes with electricity regardless of low winds and dark winter days.
The heavy investment comes as fears rise that Mr Miliband’s rush to build wind and solar farms is leaving the grid too exposed to the weather and vulnerable to outages.
Over-reliance on intermittent renewables could even threaten blackouts of the kind that hit Spain in April, say experts.
Nuclear generation is a reliable source of so-called baseload power, the minimum amount of demand on the grid.
Writing in Telegraph, Mr Miliband said the announcement marked a new “golden age” for the British nuclear industry.
He said: “This challenge of energy security and the demands of the climate crisis mean that it is in our interests to shift as fast as possible to clean, home-grown power.
“The demand for that power is expected to at least double by 2050. That’s why we need all the clean, home-grown sources that we can to meet the demands we face. New nuclear is a crucial source of firm, baseload power.”
In the Spectator, Ross Clark looks at the expected timeframes for this boost to nuclear power and concludes it isn’t going to save Ed Miliband.
But nothing that Miliband has unveiled does anything to help the Energy and Climate Secretary achieve his ambition to decarbonise the electricity supply by 2030 – or ease the coming crunch as he tries to reach that target. It has already been 15 years since the government approved plans for a new nuclear plant at Hinkley C – which developers EDF promised would be ready to cook our Christmas turkeys by 2017. The earliest it will now open is 2029, by which time it will have cost at least £46 billion.
Hinkley C is proposed to use the same design, which has proved difficult and costly to build in France and Finland, too. Why Miliband should think it will be any different this time around is hard to tell. To judge by past experience, it will be the 2040s before Sizewell C is cooking our turkeys. The only change in Sizewell C’s case is that the UK taxpayer will be bearing far more of the construction costs. In Hinkley C’s case, EDF is supposed to be bearing all the risk; with Sizewell C, that has been mostly transferred to the taxpayer.
Nor are SMRs going to save Miliband. There is logic in reducing the scale of nuclear reactors so that they can be built on a production line rather than by bespoke design on-site. It is good that Rolls Royce has won the competition for government cash to develop its SMR design, £2.5 billion funding for which has also been announced today. Nevertheless, there is hardly anyone who believes that SMRs will be up and running before 2035. There is also no guarantee they will prove cheaper than existing large nuclear plants.
Both the Telegraph report and Ross’s Spectator article are worth reading in full.
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