Fresh planning delay for Sizewell C

The government has again shelved the decision on whether to grant planning permission for EDF’s project to build a new nuclear power plant at Sizewell.

The fresh delay for the 3.2GW project in Suffolk was announced in a written ministerial statement to the House of Commons yesterday (Thursday) by the then junior business minister Paul Scully.

Yesterday’s announcement, which took place against a backdrop of the Whitehall chaos surrounding the resignation of prime minister Boris Johnson, marks the second time that a decision on the new Sizewell plant has been postponed.

The project was due to have received approval in May, three months after the department for business, energy and industrial strategy (BEIS) received a report from its planning inspectors on the application.

However on 13 May, Scully announced that the deadline for deciding on the project had been pushed back to today. The timetable has now been extended again to “no later” than 20 July, the day that Parliament is due to break up for its summer recess.

Since issuing the Sizewell statement, Scully has been given a new job as minister of state at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities as part of the wider government reshuffle over the last three days.

The delay for the twin reactor Sizewell project, which is due to be built on land adjacent to the site’s existing ‘B’ plant, also follows the French government’s decision to nationalise the private stakes in EDF.

Funding boost

A consortium led by Sizewell C has also been awarded £3 million by the government to develop plans for a Direct Air Capture (DAC) greenhouse gas removal project.

The consortium aims to develop a demonstrator DAC unit capable of extracting 100 tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere each year.

The unit would be powered by heat from the new nuclear power station, unlike other DAC systems, which rely on electricity and natural gas.

The consortium claims that heat from Sizewell C could power a DAC unit big enough to capture 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 each year, nearly equivalent to the UK’s total emissions from railway transport.

The consortium also includes engineers from the University of Nottingham, Strata Technology, Atkins, Doosan Babcock and Sizewell.

The CO2 removed from the atmosphere via DAC will be stored or “recycled” for other purposes such as conversion into synthetic fuels.

Sizewell C is one of 15 green house gas removal projects which have been awarded a total of £54 million in seedcorn funding by the government.

They include £4.75 million for a plant in Swindon to convert gas from household waste into low carbon hydrogen for use in the transport industry and £2.9 million to Mission Zero Technologies in London to build a machine that can pull CO2 out of the air.