The Half-Life of Local Support for Nuclear Power

Or: more reasons why, and how, we should speed up building new nuclear

Since Britain Remade, the campaign we both work for, launched 18 months ago, we’ve spent a lot of time travelling around the country trying to understand why it’s so hard to build things in Britain.

Speak to people in Cardiff about building new nuclear power plants and, despite being only 20 miles across the Severn Estuary from Hinkley Point in Somerset, they’ll shrug their shoulders and maybe mutter something about Chernobyl or cost overruns. The general population’s knowledge of nuclear power is poor - a surprising number of Brits are unaware that nuclear power is low-carbon - and informed by the cultural memory of historical disasters and anxieties over things like waste. Nuclear also feels dangerous, with its branding tainted slightly by it sharing a name with apocalyptically powerful weapons of mass destruction. 

This is borne out by polling on public support for nuclear power. Last year, we asked 2,000 people if they supported or opposed building new nuclear in their area. While 50% were supportive, which broadly aligns with other polling on nuclear, this pales in comparison to support for new onshore wind (72%), offshore wind (77%) and solar farms (75%). Largely it seems that the public as a whole are less supportive of nuclear energy than other forms of clean power generation. 

Yet take the long drive across Wales from Cardiff to Anglesey, where the Wylfa nuclear station stopped generating power in 2015, and residents there speak with a genuine misty-eyed fondness of the well-paid jobs and opportunities that nuclear power provided their area.

The reasons for this are obvious. Not only do nuclear power plants create good local jobs, but they provide a well paid work force that spends their money in the local community. Unlike some forms of new critical infrastructure, like housing or grid connections which have dissipated benefits and clear costs borne by the people that live nearest to them, many of the benefits of nuclear generation are felt most strongly by the local communities directly affected by it. 

These benefits are why we were able to fill a room with enthusiastic supporters on a cold, wet Thursday in January for a public meeting on bringing new nuclear back to Cumbria, where Britain built the world’s first commercial nuclear power station. 

The existence of strong local support for nuclear might seem like a bit of interesting sociological trivia, but we think it’s important, particularly as we shouldn’t presume the views of these communities are set in stone.

In places like Anglesey, where the local council has introduced an increased rate of council tax to deter second homeowners, we’re beginning to see a shift in the population that lives there, with the people who remember nuclear power generation gradually being replaced by those who are much more interested in the area as a holiday destination. It’s very possible that local support for nuclear power in places that previously had nuclear power generation has a half-life, and will begin to fade the longer we wait to replace it.

Which is why it’s particularly frustrating that Britain hasn’t built a new nuclear power station since the 1995 completion of Sizewell B. Britain only has nine currently operating nuclear reactors, with eight of these expected to stop generating electricity within the next four years. While plant life spans can be increased and already have been in some instances, in the long run it is more economical to build new, modern reactors. With the retirement of the eight AGRs imminent, we need to be serious about getting the next generation of nuclear reactors built, while there’s still strong local support for them in areas with a proud nuclear heritage.

There have been attempts to do this in the past. In 2008, Gordon Brown gave the go-ahead for a new generation of nuclear power stations, with at least eight new stations during the next 15 years promised. This was subsequently confirmed by the coalition government in 2010. Bradwell, Hartlepool, Heysham, Hinkley Point, Oldbury, Sellafield, Sizewell, and Wylfa all have hosted nuclear power plants before and were chosen as the future sites. Yet 16 years later, only one of these plants is even under construction. This is despite many of these being in Parliamentary seats that will be crucial for any party hoping to win a majority at a General Election.

The one plant under construction, Hinkley Point C, is the most expensive nuclear power plant constructed this century, which our research has shown makes Britain the most expensive country to construct new nuclear power. It’s faced significant planning and regulatory hurdles, while also having to deal with a depleted skills base. Challenges over dumping dredged mud to having to spend millions of pounds on habitat mitigations to save 120 fish a year, have added up to slow down construction and lead to cost overruns, whilst discouraging a faster roll-out of more nuclear power.

Speeding up building new nuclear

Firstly, the strategy that Britain takes to the pipeline of nuclear projects is flawed and leads to nuclear reactors being much more expensive than they need to be. Instead of announcing one big plant at a time, we need to commit to building a fleet of reactors. South Korea builds fleets of 8-12 reactors, and as a result, is the cheapest country in the world for building nuclear power plants. Every place that Gordon Brown proposed should get a reactor, and Britain should be building these sequentially. 

The Government’s announcement of Great British Nuclear, which, if they win the next election, could be rolled into Labour’s planned Great British Energy, is the perfect organisation to provide the strategic direction to implement a full fleet of new reactors. This commitment allows companies to plan investments in skills and encourages workers to train in the highly specific trades that are needed to build nuclear power stations. These investments are then spread across a greater number of plants, while workers learn by doing.

We could also speed up the time it takes for a nuclear reactor design to pass its generic design assessment, a process that currently takes four or more years. We should allow any design that American or European regulators have approved to be given automatic design approval. This would allow the Korean designed APR-1400 to gain approval to be built in the UK as America approved the design in 2019. South Korea can build six APR-1400s for the same price that it is taking us to build Hinkley Point C.

Hinkley Point C has been so expensive partially because of all the changes EDF had to make to the reactor design to meet Office for Nuclear Regulation Standards. The 7,000 design tweaks to the EPR-1750 reactor meant that Hinkley Point C will require 35% more steel and 25% more concrete than other EPR-1750s. Instead of being able to replicate the reactor design that EDF built in France, Finland, and China, Hinkley Point C is effectively an entirely new design. Rather than applying the lessons that EDF had learned constructing the prior EPR-1750s, these design tweaks meant that there were a number of unexpected challenges. The first of a kind nuclear reactor is always more expensive than following reactors, so these design tweaks unnecessarily added cost to what was already a safe reactor design.

Finally, we should do all we can to speed up the rollout of new Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). One advantage of SMRs is that they provide an opportunity for private investment into reactors as smaller capital costs can be more easily financed privately, shifting costs away from the public purse. By manufacturing the components on production lines in factories and assembling them on site, SMRs have the potential to further bring down the cost of new nuclear power. 

But to do this successfully, we need to speed up reactor design approvals and make it easier to find sites to build them on. Ex-coal plants and co-location with heavy industry are great places to start, but many of the economies of scale will be lost if SMRs are required to navigate the same planning process as full-scale nuclear power stations. 

Britain has a proud nuclear heritage, but the areas which house Britain’s atomic past and present are changing. We need to move quickly to capture their pro-nuclear spirit to power Britain’s low carbon energy needs for the future.