Ex-Tory energy secretary blasts nuclear ‘mega dreams’

The UK’s nuclear programme should prioritise small modular reactors, according to the ex-minister who gave the green light for the country’s last successfully delivered large atomic power station.

Lord Howell, who secured Sizewell B power station when energy secretary in Margaret Thatcher’s government, told a House of Lords debate that the country’s nuclear power programme is at a “crossroad” with the government at risk of taking the wrong path forwards.

One fork in the road means pushing ahead with “mega-nuclear giant projects”, like EDF’s Hinkley Point C currently under construction in Somerset.

However such projects take “10 or 15 years to complete”, Lord Howell said, adding:“The other route is to recognise that those giants have had their day and that instead we should concentrate resources and skills on smaller modular reactors, designed at a time of revolution in nuclear power technology worldwide and which, it is claimed, can be built much more quickly and sooner and are much more attractive to private investors for that very reason.”

He said that the three front runners in the government’s current SMR competition – Rolls Royce, GE Hitachi and Holtec – would all be ready for delivery before the end of this decade.

And private sources of cash, like pension funds, would be much more likely to invest in SMRs than large nuclear power stations due to the longer completion periods for these traditional projects, the Conservative peer said: “If we build giant white elephants on yesterday’s technology, no one will touch it, and certainly not investors.

“Smaller nuclear power plants, ready much sooner, offer far the best hope in our net zero ambitions, based on new technology, on streamlined approval procedures, which are certainly needed, and, above all, primarily on private finance.

“With sets of SMRs built off-site and ferried in, this would also avoid all the local chaos and disruption of a prolonged 10 to 12-year construction site, not forgetting the long-term decommissioning problems and costs that these mammoths necessitate.”

The future priority, he said, should not be on “the nuclear mega-dreams of the past, which took decades to build and are still bulging with growing risks, that we will depend for our clean, reliable, low-carbon electricity supply. Size no longer wins in the digital age.”

During the debate, a former First Sea Lord said it is a “national disgrace” that the UK relies on imported nuclear expertise, having pioneered civil application of the technology. Lord West also said it is “far more important” to put expenditure into nuclear power than the HS2 rail programme.