In a new report, the Britain Remade lobby group pushes nuclear strongly, as part of its ecomodernist growth-based future. It models different nuclear build costs and renewable price scenarios to assess long-term impacts on household energy bills. But although it accepts that ‘renewables may have seen large price-falls over the last 15 years’ it says that ‘at high penetrations costs linked to managing intermittency are high: Britain has added 40 GW since 2010 and 120 GW is forecast by 2030, yet balancing, curtailment, backup, and overbuild still add cost and leave gaps that require firm power’.
It is also not very happy about the local environmental impact of renewables, given their high land use compared with nuclear plants. Well yes, but the land on which renewable techs sit is not all lost to other uses and offshore wind farms use no land. And the nuclear fuel cycle (from uranium mining through to eventual waste disposal) also involves land use.
The new report does admit that Britain is the most expensive place to build nuclear capacity. It notes that ‘Hinkley Point C (HPC) is estimated to cost £46 billion, or £14,100 per kW: when finished, it will be the most expensive nuclear power station ever built. British-built plants cost far more per kW than peers: our per-kW costs are about six times South Korea’s, and France and Finland deliver the same EPR design for less per kW (27% and 53% respectively). Britain has gone backwards on cost: Sizewell B in 1995 cost £6,200 per kW, less than half Sizewell C’s budgeted cost.’
That certainly is striking, given that that the EPR projects in Finland and France were both plagued by construction problems. For example, work on Flamanville 3 in France 'had to be redone multiple times because it did not meet standard. Early concrete pours were too wet. Steel reinforcements did not match the blueprints. Welds that should have been neat, continuous seams showed defects and had to be redone, including around pipe penetrations. For safety-critical systems, patching is not an option. Entire sections had to be cut out, redone, and tested extensively.' Despite this, it notes 'Flamanville 3 still cost about a quarter less than Hinkley Point C’.
To improve things in the UK (not an easy task you might think, using the same vendors) it wants better regulation and reduced planning barriers. Well we will see how that goes with EDF's new Sizewell C EPR. But better planning systems and regs might also help renewables ! Overall Britain Remade seems a bit desperate in its promotion of nuclear: ‘If renewable costs rise, nuclear can play an even larger role: government forecasts assume falling solar costs (-27% by 2040) and modest wind cost drops (-6%), but recent data show solar prices flat and wind costs rising. If renewables costs climb 30% above baseline, the most cost-efficient plan would be eight new plants at French prices (saving £7.6 bn) or fifteen at Korean prices (saving £21 bn) over 25 years, with benefits lasting decades’.
Lots of assumptions about costs there, and also about demand and markets, with there being some big uncertainties. For example, the UK has already effectively blocked China and Russia as vendors. And the state-run Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co. has been prohibited from bidding for new power plant projects in North America, the UK and the European Union (excluding the Czech Republic), and other countries under its agreement with U.S. energy firm Westinghouse over an intellectual property (IP) dispute.
Ah well, maybe the nuclear lobby will just have to rely on demand-push from AI, which the Britain Remade report claims ‘will generate a large increase in baseload energy demand that wind and solar are ill-suited to meeting without substantial overbuilding’. And also perhaps on an SMR breakthrough that transcends market and trade barriers. Don’t hold your breath though, even with the new US-UK nuclear deal: there is nothing actually ready yet. And some say it looks unlikely that anything significant will change in terms of nuclear costs or new capacity until the mid 2030s. Unless that is you believe the International Atomic Energy Agency, which says that global nuclear operational capacity will more than double by 2050, reaching 2.6 times the 2024 level, with SMRs expected to play a pivotal role in this expansion.
The nuclear lobby does seem very single-minded these days. UKAEA Director General Grossi said ,‘the IAEA’s steadily rising annual projections underscore a growing global consensus: nuclear power is indispensable for achieving clean, reliable and sustainable energy for all.’ But its report doesn’t say much about the prospects for renewables except that hydro is falling and that the combined share of wind and solar reached under 15% of global power in 2024. Despite the reality of renewable expansion and the slow actual progress of nuclear, we seem to be faced with a projection of nuclear triumphalism - and that’s in both technical and political terms. As U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said at the launch of the new US-UK nuclear deal: ‘With the United States at the helm of a global energy transformation, our strategic partnerships are driving the advancement of nuclear technologies, securing a clean, reliable and secure energy future for generations to come… This is how we unleash the full power of American Energy Dominance - with innovation, strength, and key geopolitical collaboration’.
Not everyone in the UK will relish American dominance, even in a collaborative context, if that is what we face in this sector, and maybe in others, like AI. However, for good or ill, the Labour government, like most governments, is wedded to technology-led growth. So, with China now politically bared and the EU somewhat out of bounds, US help is evidently seen as vital. Like the US, the UK is now pushing nuclear hard: 75% of the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero’s £6.7bn spending in 2024-25 was allocated to nuclear.
It is true that renewable are also being pushed in the UK (not now under Trump in the US), but mainly via private sector investment e.g. £1.5bn for last year’s CfDs. Which way might it go in future given the US influence? The new US-UK ‘technology prosperity’ deal pushes nuclear and also AI hard, but ignores renewables. You will find exactly the opposite approach in Electrotech, the new Ember global energy report, with renewables dominating, a view also shared by the latest World Nuclear Industry Status report, which depicts nuclear as mostly declining and as something of a dead end option – see my next post.
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