Nuclear reactors won’t fix Britain’s energy crisis – and the government’s lack of transparency proves it
Boris Johnson’s energy security strategy sounded more like cobbled-together instructions from the editors of certain right-wing media outlets than a considered, evidence-based policy.
Kwasi Kwarteng, his energy minister, claimed the strategy would reduce bills over time. But as they put nuclear energy, North Sea oil and gas, and fracking at the centre of the plan, there isn’t much truth in that – much like the claims that Downing Street followed its own Covid rules.
New nuclear is about twice as expensive as most renewables and gas-powered electricity is currently up to three times more expensive than renewables. The government also announced that small modular reactors (SMRs) will form a “key part of the nuclear project pipeline”. For those who are not aware, SMRs are a proposal from the UK’s nuclear submarine manufacturer Rolls-Royce to build small nuclear reactors in a central factory, for distribution around the UK.
So, I decided to pose four basic questions to Kwarteng’s department about this “key” element:
1. What will be the added cost for consumer bills if they build 10 SMRs?
2. Will the reactors be privately insured or will taxpayers bear the brunt?
3. What will be the decommissioning costs and who will pay?
4. What country will supply the uranium?
After four days I got a call from his press office saying, “These issues are being looked into by our policy people and Rolls-Royce. There are no definitive answers at this stage.”
Here is a government, in the midst of cost-of-living and climate crises, claiming to reduce consumer bills and deliver a 95 per cent zero-carbon grid by 2030. And yet it could not answer even basic questions about the “key part” of the strategy it has pieced together.
Many ecologists reject nuclear because of the decades it can take to build and its eye-watering costs. There is no reason to believe SMRs will be any faster in development or come in any cheaper than the current fleet of nuclear plants. SMRs have been “in development” in many other nuclear states for decades, without a single plant delivering grid-priced electricity to date.
The US’s NuScale SMR project has been a nightmare of delays and cost overruns. South Korea’s SMR programme has likewise failed to produce a working plant, despite more than a decade of development.
Even the UK government admits that production of these SMRs would start in the early 2030s at the earliest – and that’s if this untried technology passes all safety tests, during a five-year assessment from the Office for Nuclear Regulation. No insurer is willing to carry the risk of a nuclear catastrophe, either. This is understandable given that the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster cost Japan at least 21.5 trillion yen (about £130bn).
The fact that the government has no answers about how these SMRs will be decommissioned is crucial, as the Rolls-Royce-built SMR reactors for the UK’s retired submarine fleet have been sitting in rotting floating vessels tied up at Rosyth dockyard in Scotland for decades, with so solution yet in sight.
According to the Nuclear Decommissioning Agency’s latest report, the costs for “cleaning up” Britain’s closing nuclear power stations, have soared to more than £132bn, having nearly tripled between 2017 and 2022. Remember that about £5bn would insulate every roof in Britain to modern standards, reducing fuel poverty for millions for decades to come.
Another lurking issue is that many of the proposed sites for the SMRs are at existing coastal nuclear power plants. Numerous experts have warned that with accelerating ice-melt at the polar caps, these will be increasingly under threat of inundation. Thus, insurance and decommissioning would be a huge invisible taxpayer subsidy to SMRs, as renewables pay for their own insurance and decommissioning costs.
To keep up to speed with all the latest opinions and comment, sign up to our free weekly Voices Dispatches newsletter by clicking here
It is bizarre that the government is unable to say where the uranium to power the plants would come from. Fifty-four per cent of current uranium production comes from just three former Soviet republics: Kazakhstan, Russia and Uzbekistan. Kazakhstan alone produces 41 per cent, and recently invited the Russian army in to quell a rebellion. So much for UK “energy independence” with this nuclear-led strategy.
Doug Parr, chief scientist at Greenpeace, told me: “The government is making a bet on something that may not even work and it does not solve the dangerous hazards implicit in all nuclear reactors.”
