KICK NUCLEAR July 2025

 The monthly newsletter of the Kick Nuclear group

ANOTHER £14.2 BILLION FOR SIZEWELL C!

On 10th June the government announced investment of £14.2bn over the next five years in the project to build the new two-reactor power station at Sizewell C in Suffolk. This brings to £17.9bn the total government (ie taxpayer) commitment to building the station.

Meanwhile the government and Electricité de France (EDF) have been failing to find private or other states entities to invest in the project since the government bought out China General Nuclear Power’s 20% stake in the project over safety concerns and EDF reduced its stake in the project from an original 80% to only 16.2%, meaning the UK government now owns a whopping 83.8% of the project. This is in spite of the offer of generous terms to potential investors. Called the “Regulated Asset Base” model this allows investors to be paid by levies on consumers for costs being incurred during building rather them having to wait to be paid back for the expenditure out of money paid by electricity consumers after the power station is operating.

The final investment decision over Sizewell C when it will be decided whether enough investment in the project for it to go ahead was supposed to be taking place this year, but this requires that enough investment has been advanced to cover the predicted cost of the project, which has now risen to around £40bn according to the Financial Times and other sources, though EDF rejects these estimates. The original estimate was £20bn. That leaves a current block hole of a mere £12bn to be filled.

Meanwhile the estimated date of Sizewell beginning operation has been continually put back.

It was long ago as 2009 that a plan for eleven new nuclear power stations was announced by the government, including at Hinkley Point and Sizewell. This was reduced to eight the following year.

Up to present only one of these eight is still in process of being built. This is 2-reactor Hinkley C power station in Somerset. This started building in 2016 with the scheduled start-up of 2025 for electricity generation. However the start-up date has been continually put back and is now generally estimated as after 2030.

Meanwhile Sizewell C, planned to be of the same design as Hinkley C and also with two reactors is the only other one of the original eight to have gained planning permission, this in 2022. Ground work there began in early 2024, but building the actual power station has not yet started pending the final investment decision. Its start-up date is now estimated in the mid-30s supposing the final investment decision takes place this this year finds that the project can go ahead.

In 2024, the UK government announced plans for the largest expansion of nuclear power in 70 years, aiming to increase nuclear generation to 24GW by 2050. As part of this the government purchased Wylfa and Oldbury nuclear sites from Hitachi for £160 million in March 2024 to build new nuclear power stations on. Hitachi had given up plans to build nuclear power stations at the two sites.

The current Labour government is equally enthusiastic about a great expansion of nuclear power but has yet not put forward plans for large reactors at the Wylfa and Oldbury sites. Indeed it seems more focussed on developing Small Modular Reactors.

“TOO SMALL TO SUCCEED”

On June 20 Climate and Capital Media published an article with the above title by veteran nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen which debunks the idea that building small modular reactors (SMRs) will be safer and cheaper to build and run than the very large nuclear reactors that have been the main focus up to the present but which have been found to be extremely expensive to build and maintain, polluting in that they produce large volumes of radioactive gas, particles and waste, and dangerous in that they can lead to disasters such as at Three Mile Island, Chornobyl and Fukushima. Below are extracts from Gundesen’s article.

Gundersen first argues that:

“The ‘small’ label is relative only to the behemoths of the last century. In practice, a ‘small’ reactor brings all the big problems of a conventional reactor: dangerous radioactive fuel, complex safety systems, and the risk of catastrophic failure or sabotage…The only thing that’s truly small about SMRs is their inability to benefit from the economies of scale that, in theory, were supposed to make large reactors affordable…let’s not be fooled by the word ‘small’. Even a single SMR is a massive, highly radioactive industrial machine, capable of powering a mid-sized city and containing a radioactive inventory far greater than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki…”

“...If anything, their smaller size exacerbates some problems. Because of their compact cores, SMRs can leak more neutrons than conventional reactors, leading to more complex damage to the nuclear reactor itself and different radioactive waste streams [and]...waste that is harder and more expensive to manage and dispose of.”

He goes on to point out that “SMRs only exist in the imagination of the nuclear industry and its supporters…There are no engineering plans, no blueprints, no working prototypes.”

He explains that the idea behind SMRs is “to build advanced atomic fission reactors, typically defined as producing up to 300 megawatts of electricity per unit, less than a third the size of a conventional nuclear plant”. He adds that “The ‘small’ part refers to their reduced output and physical footprint, while ‘modular’ means they’re designed to be built in factories, shipped to sites, and installed as needed, supposedly making them cheaper and faster to deploy than traditional reactors. In theory, you could add modules over time to scale up output, like snapping together Lego blocks.”

But, “SMRs introducing a host of new engineering challenges that have not been thoroughly analysed or experienced in traditional nuclear power plants, potentially offsetting any anticipated benefits and prolonging the path to reliable deployment…SMRs introduce a host of untested problems, including using higher-enriched uranium, close to weapons-grade, raising proliferation and safety concerns…despite the “modular” promise, each SMR is still a massive piece of radioactive infrastructure, requiring the same level of security, emergency planning, and long-term waste management as any other nuclear reactor”.

Furthermore, “Every dollar spent on SMRs is a dollar not spent on proven, less expensive, rapidly deployable renewable energy sources. Worse still, the delays and overruns that have plagued nuclear projects mean…SMRs cannot be built in time to meet urgent climate goals. Meanwhile, wind, solar, and storage are already delivering reliable, affordable, and clean power to the grid.”

In spite of all this the current government seems intent on investing large sums in this unproven technology. On June 10 the government announced a pledge of over £2.5 billion for the overall SMR programme with Rolls Royce SMR selected as the preferred bidder. It claimed that the programme “could support over 3,000 jobs at peak construction [to help]...“make the UK a clean energy superpower”. Which last is nonsense: nuclear is a very polluting way of producing electricity through the radiation it produces during mining, extraction of uranium from the ore, refining, building reactors and long-term storage of radioactive waste produced.