UK nuclear development could be ‘financial drain’

Steven Chu, the former US energy secretary and Nobel prizewinning physicist, has warned that although the British government is right to proceed with new nuclear plants they risk becoming a “financial drain” unless they can be built on time and on budget, according to the Guardian.

Chu, who was in Britain giving this year’s Romanes Lecture at Oxford University, believes a key role for nuclear power will be to provide support for other low-carbon, but intermittent, power technologies such as wind and solar, of which he is a supporter.

“Unless we can learn to build nuclear on schedule and on budget it will be a financial drain. Other countries have learned how to do this: South Korea has built 10 plants exactly the same and the tenth plant was only 60% of the cost of the original one. The cost came marching down because they just kept doing the same thing,” he told the Guardian.

“That is true of all industries. If you build exactly the same it gets cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. Everything different means it will cost more. You have to understand that. When the United States built its nuclear plants they were all different,” argued Chu who was President Obama’s energy secretary until April last year and is now a professor at Stanford University in California.

Atomic plants being built in Finland and France are much more expensive than forecast and are suffering significant delays but EDF, the company planning to build Hinkley Point C reactors in Somerset, says it will learn from those mistakes. While EDF plans to use an “EPR” design at Hinkley and possibly at Sizewell in Suffolk, other developers in Britain are planning different models.

“In the US, within a decade, onshore wind without subsidy is going to be less expensive than natural gas – even with natural gas staying at its current price which is two-and-a-half times less expensive than natural gas in the UK.

“I think England may be a different story in the sense that you have a lot of good wind resources but it’s a small country, and I know England is looking at another generation of nuclear reactors which I am in favour of: perhaps what we need is one more generation of nuclear reactors.”

The Stanford professor is still worried that not enough progress is being made worldwide to tackle climate change but remains upbeat about Obama’s attempts to galvanise the US more, not least through the recent bilateral agreement with China.