Why Britain does not have a nuclear fleet to rival France

The case for atomic power to restore our energy system is clear – we must be bold

macron

During the Second World War, even though London was repeatedly and badly bombed, the electricity supply did not give out. We had designed our system to be resilient, so the many stations around the capital kept feeding power to its citizens, even at the height of the Blitz. 

It is therefore appalling that today, after 75 years of economic growth and technological progress, we are even contemplating blackouts and demand curtailments. These decades of failure in energy policy should drive our motivation to demand a new system that reclaims our power security from the ground up.

I am a nuclear expert, and while nuclear is only one piece of the puzzle, it tells a story of early progress followed by gradual neglect and decay. 

It illustrates in the starkest terms how we succeeded when we were driven by purpose, sovereignty, and a dash of courage, and how we failed through prevarication, naïve assumption, and the curse of caution. And it illuminates some of the inherent limits to markets and inescapable obligations of every government.

Nuclear power, for all its travails, has been a British success story: our nuclear power stations are the most productive low-carbon assets in British history, vital bastions of our energy security. Since we connected the world’s first commercial nuclear power station to the grid in 1956, the fleet has provided reliable, sovereign power allowing much coal and gas to be used for heating homes and industry that would otherwise have been squandered to feed the grid.

We should have kept British nuclear

From 1956 to 1967, we built 27 nuclear reactors in 11 years and had more nuclear on the bars than either the United States or France. 

We designed and built two generations of British reactor designs, the gas-cooled Magnox reactors, and their successors the Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactors (AGRs), backed by policymakers of all Governments and both main parties. They grasped the value of energy that depended on the nation’s industrial skills and scientific ability, not on its natural resources.

There were mistakes. We built our stations the wrong way. Procurement by the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) was fragmented, with competing consortia struggling to assemble the heavy industrial capabilities or the project management capabilities required. 

Different companies constantly tinkered with reactor designs, so there was no replicability in construction or in maintenance over the years. The AGR never quite performed as expected, with materials problems requiring more frequent outages and capital investment.  

We had chosen the wrong design, but then so too had the French

Their first generation of reactors were also gas-cooled underperformers. In the 1970s, they saw that Pressurised Water Reactors (PWRs) derived from American designs were doing better and were easier to build, and they pivoted. The French built huge fleets of PWRs, replicating designs and keeping their construction workforce primed and active for two decades.

In 1978, France and the UK both had 6.4 GW of nuclear power. By 1990, the French had 56 GW, and we had 11. Today, the French have 61 GW, all PWRs, and we have six, all but one gas cooled.

What went wrong? After all, we had the same advice the French had. 

In 1978, the Labour Government accepted a recommendation from the CEGB that the PWR was the best reactor design for the future. The Conservative Energy Secretary David Howell (who still sits in the House of Lords) concurred. Howell remarked in December 1979 that: “The electricity supply industry has advised that even on cautious assumptions it would need to order at least one new nuclear power station a year in the decade from 1982, or a programme of the order of 15,000 megawatts over 10 years.”

We never built that fleet. Just as the French were launching the largest nuclear construction programme in European history, our North Sea oil and gas was coming online. We made policy decisions as if that gas would give us self-sufficiency and that it would last forever.

Under Nigel Lawson, Howell’s successor as Energy Secretary, and further Secretaries of State, that target of 10 reactors gradually became four. They were to be Sizewell B, Hinkley Point C, Sizewell C, and Wylfa B. By the time Sizewell B was finished in 1995, however, four had become just one. Hinkley Point C, Sizewell C, and Wylfa B, all first envisaged more than 40 years ago, are still not built today.  

We should have used British gas and British nuclear at the same time – nuclear to decarbonise and underpin the power sector and gas to eliminate imports. Instead, we embedded the “gas” part into the system, rather than the “British” part.

We got rid of the guiding mind over our energy system that could guarantee that we built and kept security of supply. We deregulated our energy markets to take advantage of the bonanza of cheap gas, without preserving sovereignty for our country. We allowed the burning of gas for electricity, previously thought a foolish extravagance (which will come back to haunt us in the future when we need feedstocks for chemicals and pharmaceuticals), and ploughed money into cheap-to-build, quick-to-start gas-fired stations without considering the broader ramifications. 

Cheap gas meant the earlier closures of Berkeley (1989), Hunterston A (1990), and Trawsfynydd (1991) nuclear power stations, years before their technical limits, and closed off new nuclear. No one was interested in expensive-to-build, cheap-to-run nuclear stations, while gas prices meant it was also cheap to run those stations.

By 1997, Tony Blair’s Labour Government was happy to agree with John Major’s outgoing Conservative Government that “see no economic case for the building of any new nuclear power stations”. The bipartisan consensus that drove UK nuclear development from the 1950s to the 1980s had collapsed into a consensus that it was too difficult. 

Our sovereign energy supply became tied to the North Sea. We know of course that the North Sea boost was all too temporary. By the turn of the millennium, we were net importers of oil and gas again, reliant on international markets beyond our control.

In short, we stopped owning our energy security and started renting it.

UK cannot have energy security without nuclear

Sizewell B is a miniature of what we could have had if we had kept ownership of our energy supply. It is Britain’s single largest, most reliable, and cheapest sovereign clean power generator, and it will run until 2055 at least. Every year it saves us two billion cubic metres of imported gas.

The price of not building its nine companions, which David Howell had supported over 40 years ago, is our dependence on and consumption of 18 billion cubic metres of extra foreign gas every year. That has been the price every year for two decades, and that will be the price this winter and for more than 30 winters to come.

However, the rise in gas imports over the last 20 winters did revive interest in nuclear power. 

Ed Miliband left office as Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change in 2010 targeting 16GW of new nuclear power by 2025. 

The Coalition Government took up the task, but Lib Dem ministers insisted that there could be no billpayer or taxpayer money committed to support building the first new nuclear power stations in a generation. There was no Regulated Asset Base funding model to allow a levy on consumer bills to remove the awful waste from compounding interest, or a government equity stake on offer. It took the balance sheets of EDF and CGN, both state-backed, to get one new power station, Hinkley Point C into construction, but projects at Moorside and Wylfa fell apart for lack of financing.

Even the new build programme stuttered, the sale of the existing nuclear fleet from British Energy to EDF provided a lifeline. EDF has obtained 30pc more output than projected from the eight stations they bought in 2008-9 – through skilful management, dedicated operation and £6bn-plus in extra investment. In the midst of this energy crisis, these stations, first conceived in the early 1960s, are still the cheapest power source on the grid today.

But as a country, we did not line up replacements for them. Hunterston B and Hinkley Point B, the two most valuable clean power assets in British history, retired this year with no replacement. Hartlepool and Heysham I will retire in March 2024 as things stand, again with no replacement.  

The retirement of our existing fleet forms one part of the titanic challenge facing our country, which is no less than to eliminate our dependence on imported gas all while rebuilding our entire energy system essentially from scratch. All the low-carbon energy currently operating in this country, apart from old faithful Sizewell B, will need to be replaced by or before 2050.

Faced with this reckoning, the new Prime Minister needs to answer two questions. First, does Britain want to control its energy future? And should Britain be a great nuclear nation in the 21st century?

The answer to the first must surely be yes.

If the first answer is yes, then the second should be yes as well. No country of our size and stature can guarantee its energy security without the only proven, reliable, always-on source of clean power, and the energy source with perhaps the widest range of possible applications.

But are we a great nuclear nation? Through decades of neglect, the answer today must sadly be no. We have less nuclear capacity than Sweden, Spain, Belgium and the US State of South Carolina. We will soon have less than the Czech Republic and Tennessee. Among our former competitors, the United States, Canada, France, Japan, South Korea, Russia and China, we are the only ones who do not own a complete reactor design that can currently be built and exported.

But if we are not today a great nuclear nation, should we be? Yes, of course. Our sovereignty is too important, our traditions too proud, and our scientists and engineers too good to settle for less.

How? The vision of Great British Nuclear set out by the Johnson Government should be fulfilled, expanded and delivered at speed and at scale.

First, we need to restore trust and confidence of the wider industry and investors in rational, long-term energy policy. Without that, the UK will remain a dark backwater for nuclear investment, energy security and high-quality jobs.

Only the bold and brave get rewarded

The 24 GW target should be the minimum of our ambition. We should plan for 40 GW, with contingencies for 50 GW and above. Emmanuel Macron's France has had more than 50 GW for 35 years, and we should not consider ourselves a lesser state.

We should deploy nuclear reactors in fleets, meaning multiple units on every site we choose, and multiple sites using the same technology to capture the benefits of replication. There is no greater folly than building nuclear reactors one at a time, with great gaps in between. To build one at a time increases cost, time, and risk. To build in fleets, as other countries have proved, is the only proven way to cut these.

I am not religious about building large-scale or small-scale reactors. Some sites are ideally suited for large nuclear, some for small nuclear. We need fleets of both. Neither is a silver bullet. 

Indeed, any reactor can be competitive with the right financing framework, and it is that we have lacked. We should develop an offer complementary to the Regulated Asset Base Model to cover the substantial pre-Final Investment Decision spending that developers must otherwise bear entirely at their own risk.

Large or small, we should encourage innovation in building techniques and aggressively train up a bigger workforce to deliver our ambitions.

We should have roadmaps for every single nuclear site – for large or for small as appropriate – that defines what will be built, who will build it and how it will be financed.

We should streamline the planning system, including the Development Consent Order process and the extensive permitting process. We should make it look more like we really want energy security and less like we want to accumulate reams of paperwork.

In fact, we should facilitate nuclear development as the best way to preserve the countryside we cherish. The current fleet uses barely half a square mile for the 15pc of the UK's power it produces. Give us five square miles of the 94,000 this country has, and we will finish our job.

The last task is to make nuclear part of a properly constructed, integrated and functioning energy system, rather than a collection of technologies thrown together by chance. 

Today, we have a system prone to excess: one that relies on too much imported gas that inflicts ruinous prices on suppliers and catastrophic bills on households. The excess is also one of imbalance: we have tried to decarbonise by bringing on much more variable renewable power without expanding the complement of baseload nuclear to provide stability.

This imbalance leads me to observe that an excess of anything in life will land you in hospital or in jail. 

Our system has certainly ended up in the energy equivalent of a hospital and we’re heading for debtors’ jail. 

The grid has issued warnings over potential power shortages in July and August before the dark and cold of winter even sets in. Indeed, any system where Britain needs to pay Belgium £10,000 per megawatt-hour, 5,000pc the normal price, to avoid a blackout, is not operating at peak fitness.

Restoring our energy system, and our country, to peak fitness is the task of the new Prime Minister and every member of the new Government. 

In the end, each actor in the energy system – generators, suppliers, distributors, regulator, and operator – do not accept responsibility for the system. Only the Government owns the system and the responsibility for its performance. 

If there is a blackout this winter, will the grid take the blame, or a generator perhaps? No, the Government will take the blame. 

The Government owns failure in national infrastructure in the end, and if it owns failure, it should plan for its success instead.

To achieve this, let me offer some closing thoughts to the new Prime Minister on nuclear power specifically, but I suspect it applies more broadly. The bold and the brave are the ones rewarded, not the tired and timid. Those who go small and go slow are here today and gone tomorrow. 

Those with the vision to shoulder responsibility and take on big commitments are the ones who build a legacy and who are remembered for what they gave this country.


Dr Tim Stone CBE is chairman of the Nuclear Industry Association, chairman of Nuclear Risk Insurers and a non-executive member of the Arup Group board

License this content