Britain invented nuclear power. Why did it forget how to build it?
On 17 October 1956, Queen Elizabeth II opened Calder Hall, the world's first grid-scale nuclear power station. It was a moment described as “epoch-making” and watched with awe by other superpowers. Over the next fifteen years Britain built 26 Magnox reactors, most of them approved within months. Today it struggles to build one.
It is no understatement to say that the nuclear industry has collapsed in Britain. No new reactor has been finished since 1995. Hinkley Point C won’t generate a single watt until at least 2031, by which point it will be the most expensive power station ever constructed - running £17 billion over budget. So, what went wrong?
As with the collapse of our ability to build housing and other crucial infrastructure, the blame lies primarily with overregulation. In 1974, nuclear safety passed to the Health and Safety Executive. Its adopted the ALARP framework, meaning risks must be 'as low as reasonably practicable'. In practice, this meant any extra safety measure had to be added unless its cost was grossly out of proportion to the benefit.
Under ALARP, there was no incentive to weigh safety against cost or time. If a regulator approved a design and something went wrong, they had to shoulder the blame. On the other hand, if they asked for another change, the delay or cost did not affect them. So, regulators, understandably concerned about risk, continued to demand increasingly expensive changes. Safety improved by fractions of a percent. Costs and bureaucracy skyrocketed.
Hinkley Point C took ten years to move from a government white paper to construction. It then had about 7,000 design changes. In France and Finland, similar reactors started in just three or four years, and the same design was built for 27% and 53% less respectively. Sizewell C's environmental assessment alone ran to 44,260 pages, roughly ten times the length of all seven Harry Potter books.
This failure to build nuclear matters. Without enough nuclear, Britain has become heavily reliant on gas, with gas setting the UK power price 97% of the time in 2021, compared to just 7% in France. This is because France has 57 reactors that supply around 70% of its electricity (close to 80% at its peak in the 2000s). As a result, British households now pay 40% more for electricity than French ones.
This weak energy mix left Britain especially vulnerable when gas prices increased after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In fact, the government spent an eye-watering £39.3 billion in six months keeping energy bills down. Without that help, a typical household bill would have been £4,279 a year. Gas still has a place, but nuclear could have helped cut costs.
Right now, the UK is far from energy secure. The Adam Smith Institute's Global Energy Security Index ranks the UK just 41st in the world, and 5th in the G7, for energy security. This is largely because wind and solar, which are, by their nature, weather dependent, now supply over a third of our electricity. This means, when the wind drops, the UK’s increasingly diminishing gas supplies have to fill the gap.
So, how can we improve our energy security and build more nuclear? France has been much more successful in building thanks to its clear regulatory system. The French government selected one American reactor design and built it again and again, getting quicker and cheaper each time. South Korea does the same, building 8 to 12 reactors of the same design in a row, at roughly a sixth of the UK's cost.
The UK should approve groups of reactors at once, rather than one plant at a time, so they can be built far more quickly and affordably. Similarly, it should automatically approve reactor designs already accepted by trusted foreign regulators, such as France's, including small modular reactors. If a reactor is safe for France, it is safe for us, and much cheaper too.
Further, it should scrap ALARP and replace it with a rule that properly weighs safety against cost and time, just like any other infrastructure project. It should also introduce a Contracts for Difference (CfD) scheme open to give all low-carbon technologies equal terms. This would mean, instead of one-time deals such as Hinkley's, developers bid for a guaranteed price for their electricity, with the cheapest bids winning.
If Britain had kept building at its 1956 to 1998 pace, nuclear would now supply around half of the country's electricity. Instead, nuclear output has decreased to about half its peak. Seventy years ago, Britain opened the world's first grid-scale nuclear power station at Calder Hall. It was able to do this because the system allowed it to build quickly. If the rules are changed, there is no reason why Britain cannot do it again.
Zak Siami