The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) is enthusiastic about wasting taxpayers’ money. It allowed, and arguably caused, consumer energy prices to fly out of control by tying the wholesale price of windfarm electricity to Russian gas with which it should have had no connection. It failed to supervise the National Grid infrastructure so we may have blackouts this winter. So much for “security”. No decision has been made on any nuclear electricity generator since Hinkley Point C nine years ago which is now running three years late (operational 2026 maybe) and 50% over budget (so far). Not being in the business of learning from experience, DESNZ is keen to build its twin at Sizewell.
Britain needs over 20 times The Sizewell capacity that if it is to reach net zero by 2050 and its costs will be about 5 times higher than the small modular reactors (SMRs) now available.
If that catalogue of failure is not bad enough, DESNZ is hastening slowly down the SMR path, whereas it is now about to spend £650M on fusion reactors. That was announced a year after telling us that there was no guarantee fusion would work – not on a commercial scale that is. Con-Fusion will cost taxpayers £650M, two thirds the cost of one of the SMRs we badly need.
“Nuclear fusion was ‘discovered’ in the 1920s and the subsequent years of research focused on developing fusion for nuclear weapons. In 1958, when the United States’s war research on fusion was declassified, it sent Russia, UK, Europe, Japan and the US on a race to develop fusion reactions for energy provision.”
One of the questions is the availability of fuel. On 16th October 2023, DESNZ said “Fuel abundance: the fuels used in fusion reactions are effectively inexhaustible. Deuterium is readily extracted from seawater, and tritium is produced using lithium.” Just over a year earlier, Science magazine claimed “A shortage of tritium fuel may leave fusion energy with an empty tank.”
No one thinks fusion can make any contribution to net zero 2050. When Graham Springer MP asked, at the May 2023 Science and Technology Select Committee, “would it not make sense to put some of the money going towards fusion into more small modular nuclear reactors?” Dame Sue Ion agreed 3 or 4 SMRs should come first (they aren’t) and argued fusion was a relatively small amount for the basic science by comparison. That is what fusion enthusiasts have been saying for 100 years.
The truth of the matter is that they want to keep up with their opposite numbers in other countries which is the exact opposite of DESNZ policy on SMRs. Con-Fusion?