The funny thing about nuclear power stations is that few places actively want one, but almost anywhere that’s lost one is desperate to bring it back.
When I visited the island of Anglesey, or Ynys Môn, last year I was struck by how much people wanted a new nuclear power station to replace the recently decommissioned Wylfa.
In its heyday, Wylfa power station not only produced almost half of Wales’s electricity, it also provided dirt-cheap reliable power to the nearby Anglesey Aluminium smelting plant. Both meant decent paying skilled jobs for locals. Both have since shut down.
A boom in tourism to the island has helped stem the loss of jobs, but it’s come at a cost. Young people who would have once worked at Wylfa or Anglesey Aluminium are now forced to leave the island – unable to afford housing on hospitality wages as second home buyers move in.
There was a plan to replace Wylfa with a new nuclear power station, Wylfa Horizon, built by Hitachi, but it collapsed when the Japanese conglomerate pulled out. Financing ultimately killed the £15 billion project, yet it was far from the only problem.
Even if the funding could have been sorted, the plant would still have needed planning permission. In a 906 page report, released in 2021, the Planning Inspectorate recommended rejecting the project.In effect, it decided that creating thousands of jobs and enough low-carbon electricity to power six million homes was not enough to outweigh the impact on local seabirds. Like Hinkley Point C, Hitachi’s advanced boiling water reactor design was a first of its kind for the UK.
There’s hope yet for Anglesey. At the Budget in March, Jeremy Hunt announced the government would buy the site from Hitachi as part of a £160 million deal. The Financial Times recently reported that officials from the department for energy security and net zero are speaking to South Korea’s nuclear national champion Kepco about building a new nuclear power station on the site.
Why is our government so keen to speak to the Koreans? Put simply, it’s their track record. South Korea builds nuclear power plants for less than any other country in the world.
Britain Remade, the campaign group I work for, looked at every single nuclear plant built (or under construction) since the year 2000. The analysis showed that not only does South Korea have the lowest inflation-adjusted costs per megawatt produced, they can build nuclear power plants for six times less than it is costing us to build Hinkley Point C.
One nuclear analyst told me that this analysis actually understates South Korea’s cost advantage. Not only are South Korea’s plants built cheaply per megawatt, they are extremely reliable too. According to data from the International Atomic Energy Association, South Korea’s plants are on average more than five times less likely to lose capacity due to unplanned outages (such as engineering faults) than their French and British counterparts. Only Belarus has a worse record for lost nuclear capacity than the UK.
When it comes to building nuclear power stations, like almost everything, practice makes perfect. The countries that build more for less money are the countries that build the same thing again and again and again. A crucial difference between the way the UK builds nuclear plants expensively and South Korea builds them cheaply is that Korea builds fleets. The recently completed Shin Hanul 2 was the seventh Korean-designed APR-1400 nuclear reactor to come online.
Not only do the Koreans get better each time by learning from experience, the pipeline of projects allows for a large domestic skills base to build up. The uber-expensive Hinkley Point C, by contrast, was the first nuclear power station Britain has built in 29 years. In many ways, it was also a first of its kind as well, because the Office for Nuclear Regulation insisted on 7,000 changes from the original design.
South Korea’s Kepco don’t just build cheaply in their home market. Around a quarter of the United Arab Emirates’ power comes from the South Korean built Barrakh nuclear power station. The Emirati nuclear power station had all the hallmarks of a white elephant mega-project: the country had no domestic nuclear skills base and a penchant for indulging in big-money vanity projects. And yet, it came in at a third of the cost of Hinkley Point C.
Still, there’s a key difference between South Korea, the UAE and the UK. It’s our approach to regulation. In South Korea, engineers are allowed to get on with projects with little oversight. There are clearly advantages to this set-up – Britain’s high costs are driven in part by over-regulation – but there are drawbacks. It was revealed that many of the components in one South Korean reactor were counterfeit and managers falsified results to cover up that a number of control cables actually failed initial safety testing. The head of one of Kepco's subsidiaries was forced to resign for bribing a presidential aide. Although the scandal cost Kepco close to $9 billion, the punishments from the national regulator were relatively soft and some fired officials were rehired.
Such a cosy relationship between regulator and supplier is inconceivable in Britain. Our regulators focus exclusively on safety and environmental protection even when it creates significant problems for the developer. And if they didn’t, legal challenges inevitably follow. There is surely a middle-ground that can be found. One where British regulators no longer force developers to spend millions of pounds to save a few fish, as happened with Hinkley Point C, but where a strong safety culture is maintained.
To build South Korea’s APR-1400 (or the newer version, the APR+) reactor in the UK, Kepco will need to pass the Office for Nuclear Regulation’s (ONR) Generic Design Assessment. When EDF went through the process, they ended up having to make 7,000 changes to meet the ONR’s standards. The Korean reactor design is attractive precisely because it is tried and tested and doesn’t carry the risk of a brand new design. If the ONR forces it to make thousands of changes though, many of those cost advantages would disappear.
In their Nuclear Roadmap, the government recently committed to relying more on international assessments when approving new reactor designs. This is a good idea that will speed things up, but we should go further. There should be an explicit directive to avoid design modifications as long as they have been approved elsewhere, unless it is absolutely necessary due to the UK’s geography. Not only would this help keep construction costs low, it would also mean our regulator could focus on the most high-impact work such as reviewing the designs of companies like Rolls-Royce SMR.
Just as important is reforming our planning system. In its bid to win planning permission, Hitachi produced tens of thousands of pages of environmental documentation and carried out extensive consultations. Let’s make sure this work wasn’t all for nothing. A new nuclear project on the Wylfa site shouldn’t have to start from scratch. And let’s avoid the Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C debacles where hard-won planning permission was relentlessly challenged in the courts by anti-nuclear activists.
Can the South Koreans help us build new nuclear power plants cheaply? Yes, but only if we let them. If we throw the same regulatory and planning hurdles at them that caused costs to balloon at Hinkley Point C, then the wait for a new nuclear power station on Anglesey will go on.
There is another reason to move fast. Wylfa is a perfect site for a new nuclear plant for many reasons. It has a strong bedrock that makes construction easier, easy access to plentiful cooling water, and there already is a grid connection. But most crucially, it has the support of local residents who cherished the good skilled jobs that came with it. That local support has a half-life. Every year it decays as locals who can still remember the transformative effect Wylfa had are replaced by new arrivals who moved to the island for a quiet life. Time is running out.
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