MP moots funding option for Wylfa nuclear revival

Electricity windfall taxes paid by EDF’s nuclear fleet could be used to buy out Hitachi from the site of the company’s aborted atomic plant in north Wales, the area’s MP has urged.

Ynys Mon’s Conservative MP Crosbie urged the government to “think creatively” about how to revive the plans for a new power station at Wylfa, during a Westminster Hall debate in the House of Common.

Hitachi announced in September 2020 its withdrawal from plans to build a twin reactor 2.7GW nuclear station at the Wylfa site on Ynys Mon, otherwise known as the Isle of Anglesey.

The Japanese multi-national pulled out after former business and energy secretary Greg Clark’s 2019 decision that the government could offer the project a Contract for Difference with a strike price no higher than £75/ MW hour.

Crosbie said the failure of successive attempts to get the project off the ground has caused “heartbreak and disappointment” in her constituency, where the existing Wylfa nuclear power station closed in 2015 and is currently being decommissioned.

But she said the publication of the government’s civil nuclear road map earlier this month, which included a pledge to begin exploring next steps on a new GW-scale power station as big as those already planned at Hinkley and Sizewell, has raised hopes that the Wylfa project could be revived.

Urging ministers to name Wylfa as the site for this further large-scale project, Crosbie said: “We should also get the land off Hitachi, and the intellectual property from the Horizon project and into the hands of GBN (Great British Nuclear).

“The land is designated for new nuclear development. If Hitachi will not use it, it should lose it.”

She said the £200 million of electricity windfall tax paid last year by EDF’s nuclear fleet to the government could be used to buy out Hitachi and the intellectual property of Horizon, the company it set up to deliver the project.

Crosbie, who is also vice-chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on nuclear energy, said the government’s £100 million annual dividend from Urenco’s uranium enrichment activities could also be tapped.

Crosbie added that the site earmarked at Wylfa can fit four reactors, meaning that the site could deliver “twice as much” as Horizon’s previous plans.

Responding for the government, nuclear minister Andrew Bowie pointed to previous comments by prime minister Rishi Sunak that Wylfa remains a “strong and good candidate” for a nuclear plant.