Why Britain is struggling with nuclear power

The rust-colored dome rises above the muddy farmland of Hinckley Point, a headland overlooking the Bristol Channel in southwest England.

When a giant yellow crane lifted the 150ft wide concrete and steel plate into place this winter, it was a major milestone for what will be the first commercial nuclear power station built in Britain since the mid-1990s and a flagship in efforts to revive the industry.

However, the closure of the first of the two cylindrical reactor buildings was also a reminder of the huge, long and increasingly expensive effort to build what is known as Hinkley Point C.

There was work conducted at the enterprise for more than ten yearsbut is years away from completion.

Électricité de France, the French state-owned company building the power plant, recently warned of further delays. The start date, which two years ago was planned for 2027, has been pushed back to the end of this decade or possibly 2031.

The extra time will add billions more to the final bill, which could reach 47.9 billion pounds, or about $60 billion, EDF said. In 2016, the price tag was pegged at £18 billion.

Nuclear power is regaining favor in the West as a tool to reduce greenhouse gases, with the British government last month announcing “the biggest expansion of nuclear power in 70 years”. But the track record of nuclear power in Western Europe and the United States is not encouraging, with delays and staggering cost overruns hampering the latest projects. The fate of Hinkley Point and another project planned for the east coast of England in the village of Sizewell could determine whether nuclear power in Britain gains momentum or fades away.

“The hype is at an all-time high,” said Frank Gbagidi, a nuclear analyst at Eurasia Group, a political risk firm. “Governments will over-promise and under-deliver all the time.”

EDF aims to have 11,000 people working 24/7 at Hinckley by 2030, according to executives. Welders, engineers and electricians, employed by a host of contractors, are brought to the site by a fleet of white buses from a logistics center and from temporary flats around the faded industrial town of Bridgewater.

“There are a lot of workers on site at any one time,” said Susan Goss, vice-chairman of Stogursey Parish Council, the local area. “I think it can be difficult to coordinate what they're doing,” she added.

Britain was once a pioneer in splitting atoms to produce electricity, building the first series of reactors in the 1950s and 1960s, but the country has not completed a nuclear power plant for nearly 30 years.

“Britain and the US have, in a sense, forgotten how to build nuclear power plants,” said Simon Taylor, a professor at Cambridge University's Judge Business School who has written extensively about Britain's nuclear program. “We can recover this knowledge, but it will take a long time,” he added.

Nuclear plants are incredibly complex structures, and Britain lacks both a workforce with the right skills and contractors who know the choreography of tasks that go into a well-managed project, Mr. Taylor and other analysts said. Also, the British certification and permitting process for installing one of these plants is very thorough, costing would-be developers billions.

It was too much for one developer. In 2019, the Japanese conglomerate Hitachi left from a nuclear project in Wales spending £2 billion. The company blamed rising costs.

In 2008, when Prime Minister Gordon Brown's administration launched its current push to build nuclear plants, a government study showed new plants could be sending power to the grid by 2018.

Since then, only Hinkley Point has reached an advanced stage, while Britain's nuclear generation capacity has fallen by more than 40 per cent as aging plants are phased out, according to trade group the Nuclear Industry Association. Nuclear plants provided about 14 percent of the country's electricity last year, up from 21 percent a decade ago.

“Retraining nuclear skills, building a new supply chain and training the workforce has been a huge challenge,” Stuart Crooks, Hinkley Point's managing director, said in a recent memo to staff.

Adding to the problem: The reactors being built at Hinckley Point have a reputation for being problematic. The British government allowed EDF to buy most of Britain's existing nuclear power system in 2009, and the company chose a project the French nuclear industry helped develop, known as the European Pressurized Water Reactor, to build at Hinkley Point.

Billed as one of the safest and most powerful reactors ever built, it is now known shortages, delays and overspendingespecially at sites in Olkiluoto in Finland, which began operations in 2023, and Flamanville in France, which is expected to open this year.

In theory, developers learn lessons each time they build a station, reducing future costs, but this process does not appear to have been entirely successful with the reactors at Hinckley, which are the fifth and sixth in the design.

Roy Pumphrey, a spokesman for Stop Hinkley, a group which opposes the plant, believes it is “doomed” never to be completed. “The design of the reactor is too complicated,” said Mr. Pumphrey, a retired teacher.

In his message, EDF's Mr Crooks placed further blame for delays and cost overruns on UK nuclear regulations. To meet the requirements, Mr Crooks said the original design would require 7,000 changes, including 35 per cent more steel and 25 per cent more concrete. EDF is owned by the French government.

Britain The Nuclear Regulatory Authority responded quickly, in a Jan. 25 statement, it said it demanded the changes after the 2011 Fukushima accident in Japan, as well as the experience of other European pressurized reactors in Europe and China. As for additional concrete and steel, the regulator said France has similar requirements.

However, there is evidence that it takes longer and costs more to build nuclear power plants in Britain. Britain Remade, a group that seeks to accelerate economic development, found that similar reactors were built much more cheaply – not only in China, which leads the world in building nuclear plants, but also in Finland and France, despite delays there.

“It is clear that our approach to planning and financing reactors increases costs significantly,” two analysts, Sam Dumitriou and Ben Hopkinson, wrote in a recent study.

Despite the disappointment, nuclear power is gaining political support in Britain and elsewhere as a reliable, low-emission energy source. When completed, Hinkley Point C will power six million homes – more than two and a half times more than Britain's next largest nuclear power station. And the sustainable nature of nuclear power is an important attribute; renewable energy sources such as wind and solar are intermittent.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak recently announced an additional £1.3 billion to fund EDF's construction of its Sizewell plant, known as Sizewell S.

“Nuclear power is the perfect antidote to the energy problems facing the UK,” Mr Sunak said last month as he announced plans to quadruple nuclear power generation by 2050.

Who will pay for this expansion? It is not entirely clear.

The British government is now the principal owner of Sizewell C, having bought a minority stake in China General Nuclear, a Chinese state-owned company. EDF has cut its stake to less than 50 percent from 80 percent and says it intends to reduce it to 20 percent. EDF and the British government hope that lessons learned from Hinkley Point C will reduce the cost of Sizewell C, which has the same design.

The government is in talks with a group of investors to buy the Sizewell plant on the advice of Barclays Bank. As an attraction, officials offer a new financing model that will allow developers to pay back their investments faster.

A few years ago, Chinese firms were expected to play a big role in Britain's nuclear program, but the British government has bristled at their involvement. China General still owns about a third of Hinkley Point C, but EDF says it has stopped contributing to construction costs, leaving the French to pay for the work to continue. China General did not respond to a request for comment. On Friday, EDF said it was writing off about $13.9 billion for the project.

With so much at stake in Britain, EDF and the French government are hoping Mr Sunak will contribute even more to help finish Hinkley Point and make the next plant a success.

“It is in the interests of the British authorities that we are a reliable partner to deliver the project in the best possible condition,” said Luc Remont, chief executive of EDF. “And so I am confident that we will find a way with the UK authorities at both Hinckley Point and Sizewell.”

Keith Bradsher contributed a report from Beijing, and Liz Alderman from Paris.