The decommissioned Magnox reactor in Bradwell (Wikipedia)
The announcement of the final green light for the £24.5bn Hinkley Point C project is expected to coincide with the state visit to the UK of Chinese president Xi Jinping [corrected] on 20 October, according to press reports at the weekend.
The announcement would follow protracted negotiations between the UK government, French energy company EDF and its two junior consortium partners, the China General Nuclear Power Group and China National Nuclear Corporation.
French reactor builder Areva has already dropped out of the project following financial problems.
But The Sunday Times and The Times reported that the two Chinese firms had also secured the option to own and operate the third project in the UK’s new nuclear programme – a new reactor planned for the Bradwell site in Essex.
Bradwell, in a remote part of the estuary of the River Blackwater, is currently the site of a decommissioned Magnox reactor that operated between 1962 and 2002.
Development of the site is expected to follow on from the construction of a second EDF-built reactor at Sizewell in Suffolk.
The GMB union responded to the press reports with calls for the government to take control of the nuclear new build programme, for financial and safety reasons.
Development of the site is expected to follow on from the construction of a second EDF-built reactor at Sizewell in Suffolk (Wikipedia).
In a press release, Gary Smith, GMB national secretary for energy, said: “GMB consider that the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority should be re-tasked and renamed the Nuclear Development Authority and be given authority to borrow the money on the capital markets to partner EDF in Hinkley and Sizewell. This will be cheaper for consumers and will avoid unnecessary safety fears in UK.”
Hinkley Point was due to be operational by 2023, but last week EDF conceded that this deadline would not be hit because of delays in reaching an agreement on the “strike price” with the government, which in turn led to delays on the financial arrangements between the three consortium partners.
The news coincided with publication of a report last week by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA), which suggested that nuclear-generated electricity in the UK is likely to be more expensive than in other countries.
The study on Projected Costs of Electricity Generation tried to assess different generating technologies and countries on a level playing field, and looked at the “levelised cost of electricity” per megawatt hour using data from 22 countries.
The report estimated that new nuclear in the UK would cost £87 per MWh, approximately one fifth more expensive than in France, a third more than the US and more than twice the projected costs in China or Korea.
The differences lie mainly in higher UK financing costs, and the fact that the strike price is index-linked to inflation, according to the Carbon Brief website.
