By Rae Street and Lee Towers
The current Labour Government, like all before it,1 support nuclear power despite it never being economically competitive. We look into why UK governments are so supportive of this technology, and at some of its inherent problems.
Nuclear power is based on fission, or splitting uranium atoms, which releases a huge amount of energy.
This process is highly volatile, with the risk of meltdown of the reactor if something goes wrong, and it produces radioactive nuclear waste, parts of which remain actively dangerous for over 200,000 years. It requires expensive and complex plants that almost always come online late and over-budget, as well as expensive waste solutions whose effects are usually borne by marginalised communities.
Intrinsically high cost
As an example of how the nuclear industry is uncompetitive, we can look back to the privatisation of energy in the 1990s. The then Thatcher government tried to privatise the nuclear industry, but had to reverse this decision as it would have led to increased electricity bills – a far cry from the original promise of “energy too cheap to meter”.
False promises, eye watering costs and long delays have continued this century. Of the ten nuclear plants Ed Miliband approved in 2009 to produce energy from 2018, only Hinkley Point C went ahead but is still not complete. By the time it is operational around 2031, it is likely to have cost £46 billion, be generating electricity at twice the cost of renewables (at c.£150/MWh), and killing 180 million fish a year sucked into its cooling system.
The Sizewell C nuclear plant on the east coast of England, is another cautionary tale. When EDF (which is 100% owned by the French government) proposed it in 2020, the budget was £20 billion. Cost expectations have already spiralled to about £40billion and the Labour Government recently committed another £5.5bn of our money on top of the £2.5bn already handed over by the Conservatives. The construction costs will add a total of £500 to the bills of each household in the country before any energy has been delivered – the so-called “Nuclear Tax”. According to Together Against Sizewell C (TASC), there has been no explanation as to why these costs are astronomically higher than the original estimate and how much more public funding is likely to be assigned. Advocates argue that new technologies such as Small Modular Reactors (SMR) and Advanced Modular reactors (AMR) will solve these issues, making nuclear power cheaper, safer (including not adding to nuclear proliferation), and quicker to build. But ‘cheaper’ and ‘quicker’, push against ‘safer’, as this article explains. And the plan to build mini-nukes across the UK lacks even a prototype.
Radioactive waste
The proposed solution to legacy waste, with the UK having the largest plutonium stockpile in the World, is a geological disposal facility (GDF) around half a mile underground.
This is controversial with communities who are both wary of leakage and the stigma involved, GDF is likely to end up in what is called a nuclear community – one that already has nuclear power in place.
More broadly, the total costs of nuclear decommissioning are staggering, with the Government estimating that the 2023 cost would be between £124.4 and £263 billion. Such estimates suggest that as a society we are spending a third to half of our total generation budget on around 15% of the electricity supply.
Credit: John Hunt, mapperou.com
Climate risks to nuclear facilities
Nuclear plants need water and are usually built far from urban centres (suggesting policy-makers do not want to be near them). As the map below shows, they are in rural, coastal areas.
These locations will be vulnerable to sea rises and storm surges linked to the climate crisis, which could at least be expected to cost more in sea defences, if not lead to something much worse.
Militarism
Finally, we can speculate on the mystery of why penny pinching policy-makers who claim we cannot afford to abolish energy poverty remain wedded to extremely expensive nuclear energy. It can be explained in two words: nuclear weapons.
Researchers Andy Sterling and Phil Johnstone have long argued that the civil and military applications of nuclear are interdependent, with all reactors set up to produce military grade material. They have similar engineering and material supply chains and rely on nuclear expertise which is interchangeable.
This fact was largely denied in the UK for decades. Until 2024, when the Conservative Government decided to be unusually honest and state that yes, the military needs the civil expertise, and that nuclear power and weapons are dual aspects of one technological system. This suggests one cannot support nuclear power without also supporting nuclear weapons, an argument the anti-nuclear activists have long made.
So how will Labour sell this expensive and dangerous nuclear plan to the public?
Nuclear proliferation is a key party of the Labour plan to Make Britain a Clean Energy Superpower. Sizewell C is being given the green light and firms are bidding to build SMRs across the country, enabled by government relaxing controls on where nuclear reactors can be built. An excited Ed Miliband said: “Build, build, build – that is what Britain’s clean energy mission is all about”.
But given that nuclear has been exposed as expensive, slow and problematic, the Government is now trying to push it as an essential complement to variable renewable generation. The idea being that the stability of nuclear balances the variability of wind and solar. But this logic is flawed. Nuclear is inflexible, so won’t balance the grid. It cannot turn on when we need it, nor turn off when we have excess renewable energy. Yet another reason why nuclear power is a false solution.
The fight continues
Whilst the nuclear lobby has won over the Labour leadership, many campaigns continue to fight against the huge waste and risks of the planned nuclear proliferation. These include:
- Together Against Sizewell C
- Stop Sizewell C
- Suffolk Coastal Friends of The Earth
- Climate Action Network
- The New Labour government briefly opposed nuclear power, then did a u-turn and called for a nuclear renaissance ↩︎
