UK nuclear madness

Always remember what we said here a very long time ago: the whole point of France’s nuclear policy is to get other nations to underwrite their astronomical nuclear liabilities.

This is precisely à propos of Mr W’s prompting BTL here (he’ll kindly correct any details that need correcting) …

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The Hinkley Point C / Sizewell C story so far:

When EDF (together with Centrica & later still the Chinese) acquired the old British Energy in 2008, they were immediately set on building more of their EPR design of nukes in the UK: HPC was nominated to be the first.  Recall that until after the 2005 GE, Blair was set against a nuke revival which he’d believed to be electoral anathema: but various voices** persuaded him it was a Good Idea.   EnSec at the time was of course … Ed Miliband.  EDF had the effrontery to announce an HPC start-up date of 2017, and that it wouldn’t require a penny-piece of subsidy – the latter line being official government policy up to and including the awful Chris Huhne (remember him?)  

Next milestone event was Fukushima 2011 which, to be fair, was outright force majeure and caused significant mods to be made to the design of the structure in which the EPR reactor would be housed.  OK, so the costs went up as a consequence.  But that was the last externality that EDF can truly be excused of: covid might just also creep in to the reckoning, but not inflation, their other bleat.

During the regime of Ed Davey – to be fair, egged on by that git George Osborne – suddenly EDF was going to get subsidised.  We have written about the awful HPC CfD contract many times here.  It has only one saving grace, on paper at least: project cost overruns are solely for the account of EDF / the Chinese (who’ve now buggered off) / Centrica.  But given the outrageous one-way changes subsequently made to the CfD in EDF’s favour, at EDF’s demand, even this is of little comfort.  The project overruns are horrendous; and we know EDF will hold a gun to HMG’s head for outright cash subventions at some point.  (Personally I suspect this has already happened, disguised as SZC payments, see below.)

To repeat: once the Fukushima design changes were made, everything subsequently is down to EDF’s monstrous incompetence.  EDF hints that UK regulators have kept tinkering unreasonably with new design demands, but remember: the CfD states that unless a new regulation could have reasonably been foreseen by EDF, the latter is indemnified against extra costs arising.  So we can put ‘costly regulatory tinkering’ out of our minds.

Fast-forward to SZC

EDF, of course, realised even before the ink was on the CfD (which they only signed because they thought Brexit would scupper the project altogether) that they couldn’t carry out SZC on the terms explicitly for SZC itself that are actually contained in the HPC contract (i.e. for SZC as a put-option for EDF).  So they carefully played a lobbying game resulting in Boris agreeing to finance SZC on a US-style ‘rate base’ footing (i.e. underwritten directly by taxpayers) – and then, got HMG to stump up hard cash: a billion here, a couple more there …  now the cash commitment has hit £11 bn of taxpayer money, rather than the usual ‘stick it all on the electricity bill’.  AND – amazingly – although EDF has yet to take FID on SZC, the new reactor is already under construction in France, paid for by us.  FFS !  Talk about “too big to fail” …

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So now we loop back to the very first line of this post.  Also, we should stew in the details of how badly in trouble HPC is, and how cash-strapped and liability-riddled EDF is in general; how much HMG needs French cooperation on the Boats issue; and the perennial suspicion the whole civil nuclear programme is there to underpin the military nukes … and you have a recipe for an ongoing haemorrhage of taxpayers’ cash that starts to look seriously injurious.  And in the middle of this, Miliband thinks he can get electricity bills down!

An appalling tale – egregious even by the standards of HMG cockups and nuclear age skullduggery.  I have nothing against nukes in principle: but in practice they just never add up.  If we wanted an SZC, let it be remembered that by far our best-performing nuke has been SZB.  We should have ‘simply’ (hah!) built an updated SZB. 

ND  

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** including one G.Brown, brother of whom worked for, errrr, EDF

General – if you follow the tags, you’ll find loads more C@W posts on these topics.

Source: http://www.cityunslicker.co.uk/2024/11/uk-nuclear-madness.html