GBN chair: Planning rules put nuclear target at risk

The slow pace of the current planning regime risks jeopardising the UK’s target of 24GW new nuclear power by 2050, according to the chair of Great British Nuclear (GBN).

Giving evidence to the House of Commons environment audit committee, Simon Bowen called for an overhaul of the planning process and said it was one of his main concerns.

Noting that the 44,000-page long development consent order (DCO) application for Sizewell C Is “more than twice” as long as that for Hinkley Point C, which only went through the planning process a few years earlier, he said: “There must be better way of doing it.

“We’ve got to take a good hard look at environmental and DCO processes because the level of assessment required doesn’t fit together with imperatives on energy security and net zero and climate change.

“Those assessments are not set in the context of delivering energy security and the road net zero.

“We’ve got to try and work out ways of doing these things quicker. Otherwise we will fall behind in terms of our objectives and international competition,” Bowen said, noting that the nuclear development market is increasingly global.

He also said the government must decide whether it wants any further GW-scale nuclear projects beyond Sizewell C in order to make best use of the sites already identified for nuclear development in the National Policy Statement.

“Certain sites are very suitable” for GW-scale projects, like Hinkley and Sizewell, he said, adding that GBN will be focusing on identifying the sites best matched to the different nuclear technologies, which will also include small modular and advanced reactors.

On the government’s small modular reactor competition, which GBN is running on its behalf, Bowen said the existing shortlist of six bidders is due to be narrowed down to four during the spring and then further to one or two in the “late summer to autumn”.

He told the committee, which was conducting the hearing as part of its inquiry into SMRs, that he favoured more than one winner.

Relying on more than one technology would avoid the kind of problems, which have recently bedevilled France’s nuclear production by forcing the closure of several plants as a result of common faults across the country’s fleet of reactors.