The Chancellor’s promise of £14 billion for the Sizewell C nuclear power station in Suffolk is hardly news. The project has been talked about for 15 years while the existing UK nuclear estate has gradually been shut down and the only other new station, Hinkley Point in Somerset, has stumbled to a decade-long delay and £28 billion of budget overruns. Quite some optimism – verging on Milibandian delusion – is required to embrace the idea that Sizewell will come quicker and cheaper because it will replicate Hinkley Point while avoiding its mistakes. And since Chinese money has been ruled out, it’s still a mystery as to who else will pay for the project beside HMG and the French utility company EDF.
Unarguably, we need a constant baseload of nuclear power to stop the lights going out in mid-century: commitment to Sizewell can’t be all wrong, despite local objections. But what’s intriguing about this week’s news is that it coincides with the naming of Rolls-Royce as ‘preferred bidder’ to deliver the UK’s first small modular reactors, in theory much easier to bring to fruition. If SMRs can really deliver nuclear power one town at a time by the mid-2030s, as planned, Hinkley Point and unfinished Sizewell will begin to look like dinosaurs.
The simple truth is that both should have been done and dusted a generation ago. But nuclear decision-ducking has been a shame on successive governments for as long as most of us can remember.
Defensive stocks
My recent suggestion of a ‘Rearmament Isa’ that would incentivise savers to buy shares in UK manufacturers of military kit brought a positive response from one former defence minister but not from the current Chancellor who, let’s face it, may not be among my most devoted readers.
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