Committee urges snap review of nuclear shutdown timetable

A snap review should be carried out into whether the lives of the UK’s operating nuclear power stations can be extended, Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has urged.

The review is one of the key recommendations in a new report on the future of the UK’s advanced gas-cooled reactor (AGR) fleet published on Friday (20 May).

Under a timetable laid out by EDF Energy, which has owned the UK’s eight ‘second generation’ nuclear plants since 2009, they are due to be retired by 2028.

The closure of the stations, which provide 16% of the UK’s electricity generation, will result in a “significant reduction” in the UK’s generating capacity until new plants come online, the report said.

EDF considers that the AGR stations, which make up seven of the eight plants, will be reaching the technical limit of safe operations, meaning their use could not be extended while new generating capacity comes online.

Only the existing pressurised water reactor station at Sizewell B and EDF’s new plant at Hinkley Point C are expected to be still operating when the last of the AGRs has shut down.

The PAC recommended that the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) together with the Office for Nuclear Regulation, EDF, and Ofgem should “urgently” review whether extending the lives of the remaining operating stations would be technically feasible, safe, and cost-effective.

The committee asked for a response within four months.

The report also said that the sites of old nuclear stations could be reused as locations for developing new small modular reactors (SMRs).

The committee urged BEIS and the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) to publish plans within 12 months setting out the future best use of these sites, including whether they are suitable SMRs or other new nuclear infrastructure.

The report additionally criticised the 2009 sale of the seven AGR power stations to EDF Energy for placing a “disproportionate amount of risk for meeting future decommissioning costs on the taxpayer”.

It said failures in the government’s investment strategy for the Nuclear Liabilities Fund, which was set up to meet the decommissioning costs of the seven reactors, have already prompted a taxpayer top up of £10.7 billion in just two years. The report estimated these costs have almost doubled from £12.6 billion in March 2004 to £23.5 billion last year.

The committee’s deputy chair, Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP, said: “Our current generation of nuclear power plants are reaching end-of-life and there is huge uncertainty over the risks and timescales of decommissioning and commissioning this energy infrastructure. But we are seeing clearly the near-term risks of having to import energy.

“Government must prioritise the deliverable, safe and efficient plan to decommission these facilities and sustainably replace energy production that we owe to future generations, to alleviate the impact of rising energy costs on the public and business and insulate the UK from disruptions to our energy supply.

“The decommissioning dates of these power stations were clear decades ago. The government should have been commissioning this replacement at that time, so that by now they would be generating base load power into the grid. For these major projects with long lead times, effective forward planning by government is essential.”