The Hinkley Point disaster

How easy it would be to scorn the environmentalists who are up in arms about George Osborne’s new pet project, the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station. You can understand their anxiety: subsidies for green energy are being slashed, yet the Chancellor will do anything — and pay anything — to get this project up and running. He is happy to force households to pay artificially high prices for a form of energy which brings all kinds of risks — of which the world was reminded this week when Japan found the first cancer case liked to the Fukushima disaster of 2011. ‘Has the Chancellor lost his mind?’ they ask.

Some 30 years ago, Greenpeace members might have been chaining themselves to the fences outside Hinkley Point in protest at a new nuclear power station. However, in the space of a generation, atomic power has been transformed from a leukaemia-causing, earth-poisoning environmental outrage to a low carbon, ‘green’ form of energy — astonishing enough in itself.

But this time, Greenpeace has a point. The most remarkable thing about the project is how it has managed to evade Osborne’s cull of subsidies for other low-carbon power projects. While money is being saved on wind and sea power, the battle to bail out Hinkley Point C is being fought as if the Chancellor’s career depended on it. He used his trip to China last month to offer yet another sweetener for investors in Hinkley Point. The government, he said, would guarantee £2 billion worth of loans for the project, describing the deal as a ‘golden relationship between Britain and China — the world’s oldest civil nuclear power and the world’s fastest-growing civil nuclear power’. China has even been invited to build its own plant in Essex, to the dismay of our spies, who spend much time trying to ensure nuclear power stations are protected from Chinese cyber-espionage.

The Treasury’s bribes may only be the start: it has sought, and been granted, EU permission to guarantee up to £16 billion worth of loans — enough to fund nearly two thirds of Hinkley Point’s current estimated construction cost of £24 billion.