The risks to the government’s plans to build another eight nuclear power plants have been underlined by the latest wave of ballooning costs and delays at Hinkley Point C.
EDF, which is constructing the 3,200MW reactor in Somerset, has warned that estimated costs have jumped to between £25 billion and £26 billion, while the power station will not now start producing electricity until June 2027 at the earliest.
The revised estimates are £3 billion higher than the previous cost projections in January last year, which were in turn well ahead of the group’s initial £18 billion forecast when the project was approved in 2016. Hinkley is Britain’s first new nuclear plant in decades. It is expected to power six million homes, with the government guaranteeing that consumers pay an index-linked £92.50 per megawatt hour, in 2012 prices, for its electricity. Construction costs are being met by EDF and its junior partner in the project, CGN of China.
As part of its lobbying for government approval, EDF stated in 2007 that Britons would be cooking their Christmas turkeys on the plant’s electricity in 2017. The state-backed French energy group is now warning that even its latest projected start-up date a decade later could be optimistic, saying that “the risk of further delay of the two units is assessed at 15 months”.
In a message to staff, the project’s managing director, Stuart Crooks, said that construction works had suffered “the severe impact of Covid-19”, forcing EDF to “cut numbers on site from more than 5,000 to around 1,500”. He said that had meant “we lost in excess of half a million individual days of critical work in 2020 and 2021”.
That had been exacerbated by supply chain problems after 180 suppliers were shut down in April 2020, while “adapting the reactor design for UK-specific regulations has required more engineering time and more materials”.
Critics seized on the latest overruns to point out the risks to Boris Johnson’s blueprint for another 24 gigawatts of new nuclear power by 2050. The Stop Sizewell C lobby group pointed out that, while EDF and CGN are on the hook for Hinkley’s “rocketing costs”, a proposed new financing model would see consumers paying upfront via higher bills for cost overruns. “The £20 billion estimate for Sizewell C is already two years out of date, with zero chance of it being delivered at that cost,” it said, noting that the risk of spiralling costs would “fall on consumers”.
Doug Parr, Greenpeace’s UK policy director, said: “The government’s big bet on nuclear is backfiring with every extra billion added to the bill”. He advocated investment in offshore wind instead.
Costs at the the prototype for Hinkley, the Flamanville plant in France, have rocketed from €3.3 billion to €12.7 billion. Construction is running more than a decade late.
