Over budget and plagued with delays: UK nuclear lessons for Australia
The big challenges facing nuclear power in Britain, both for large reactors and SMRs, are not technological or economic, but largely administrative and logistical.
AFR, Hans van Leeuwen, Europe correspondent, Jun 21, 2024 –
Behind the shore of England’s south-western county of Somerset lie the Quantock Hills – as perfect a landscape of lush rolling pasture and rugged heathland, laced with woodland groves and nestled hedgerows, as you could possibly imagine. It’s also home, incongruously, to a very, very large crane.
Big Carl, as it is known, is, in fact, the world’s largest. It is six kilometres long, 250 metres high and has 96 wheels. It has spent the past few years at Hinkley Point, on the Bristol Channel. Big Carl hit a mini-climax of hydraulic achievement just before Christmas last year, as it hauled a 14-metre tall, 245-tonne steel dome onto the top of a 44-metre nuclear reactor.
Progress at last. The reactor’s name is Hinkley Point C – which sadly doesn’t quite have the same folksy ring as “Big Carl”. Fifteen years have elapsed since French giant EDF and its Chinese partner began trying to build it, and rouse Britain from decades of nuclear slumber.
Lining up the regulators and the finance took seven years. Construction is in its seventh year, and might be only just past the halfway mark. There are 10,000 workers and 3500 British companies involved in pulling this off, at a cost that may end up topping £46 billion ($88 billion) – almost thrice the original estimate of £16 billion.
This is the kind of monumental scale of project that Opposition Leader Peter Dutton wants to bring to Australia. Alongside it, he also envisages small modular reactors (SMRs): more petite, but equally dully monikered, nukes that are thrown together in a factory and then operate from what is really little more than an industrial shed.
Britain wants to build those too, and is in the last throes of a competition to put taxpayer money behind at least one contender. But even the most advanced would-be manufacturer, Rolls-Royce, doesn’t appear to expect an SMR to actually be up and running until the start of the 2030s………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Why so long, and so costly?
Greatrex offers a warning to Australia: the big challenge facing nuclear power in Britain, both for large reactors and SMRs, but most clearly in evidence at Hinkley Point C, is not technological or economic, but largely administrative and logistical.
“Issues around bottlenecks in the planning system, the time it takes for permitting on various things, the issues around access to grid and grid connections, they’re all real factors,” he says.
“There are a whole number of issues around planning and permitting that seem to be taking more time to deal with than the actual construction period.”
This has left Greatrex and his organisation fighting a rearguard action against public and media perceptions that the industry is foundering – particularly as the flagship Hinkley Point C reactor project suffers repeated cost and deadline blowouts.
Although the government has this year doubled down on building large reactors to keep nuclear’s share of British electricity generation at about 25 per cent, the negative stories keep coming……………………………………………………………………………
For 35 years after the plant starts operating, taxpayers will fill any gap between that price and the going market rate, likely resulting in a subsidy far higher than that for offshore wind or solar. The government is also guaranteeing the debt funding of almost half the capital costs of building it.
The original estimated cost of Hinkley Point C was £16 billion, and the anticipated date to get it open and running was 2023. Now, it’s £35 billion in today’s prices, which could be £46 billion by the time the work is completed between 2029 and 2031.
EDF this year took a €12.9 billion ($20.8 billion) impairment charge on the project. The Chinese partner, having been frozen out of future nuclear projects in Britain for geopolitical reasons, has reportedly been withholding its own contributions this year.
The company has blamed the blowout on design changes enforced by the regulator, along with labour shortages and supply chain issues.
Going first to restart the nuclear construction industry in Britain after a 20-year pause has been hard,” Hinkley Point C boss Stuart Crooks said in a letter to staff earlier this year.
But the British government is still pushing on with a second reactor, the 3.2-gigawatt Sizewell C on the country’s east coast, which EDF will also build. This has taxpayer backing of £2.5 billion, and the government is on the hunt for £20 billion of private capital, supposedly by the end of the year………………………………………………………………………………
Rolls-Royce rollout starts at home
But even if the Coalition has to look elsewhere than Britain and Europe for its mega-reactors, energy spokesman Ted O’Brien has explicitly name-checked Rolls-Royce as a potential partner on SMRs………………………………………..
At any rate, Rolls-Royce has to crack its home market first. The government will next month decide which of six horses to back with taxpayer largesse. https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/over-budget-and-plagued-with-delays-uk-nuclear-lessons-for-australia-20240621-p5jnkq
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