A high-stakes game of chance is being played at Hunterston B nuclear power station on the west coast of Scotland.
Engineers from the French giant EDF and safety experts from the Office for Nuclear Regulation are trying to work out if and when the plant’s two reactors can be restarted.
Forty-four years of hard use have not been kind to the plant’s graphite core — a vast chunk of carbon riddled with cracks that weighs the same as 110 double-decker buses.
While the regulator and EDF insist that, with careful supervision, a cracked graphite core is nothing to worry about, it is a symptom of its advancing years.
Hunterston, like the rest of EDF’s nuclear power stations around the UK, is on borrowed time. Seven nuclear stations capable of supplying about a sixth of the UK’s power needs will shut during the next decade.
A huge amount of stable, carbon-free power will vanish with them. Coal has already been largely eliminated from the energy mix. Unless ministers leap into action, the country that opened the first industrial-scale nuclear power station in 1956 at Calder Hall, Cumbria, will be left with just one replacement plant, Hinkley Point C on the Somerset coast, which is under construction. The government faces difficult decisions: what next in its race to eliminate carbon emissions by 2050?
For years, the UK has flirted with replacing the nuclear fleet, but never quite with conviction. Fearful of taking the huge cost of a nuclear station — about £20bn — onto the state’s balance sheet, it has tried to persuade private companies to put their money at risk. A boom in renewable power has offered the beguiling prospect that wind and solar, combined with storage such as big batteries and hydrogen, could fill the void.
A report from the National Infrastructure Commission has suggested that commercially unproven technologies, such as hydrogen generation, could negate the need for more nuclear power and be “substantially cheaper”.
With half an eye on this utopian future, successive governments have tried to persuade European power giants such as Germany’s RWE and Eon, and Japan’s Toshiba and Hitachi, to pump cash into new reactors.
However, one by one, those companies have dropped out, leaving just a handful of options remaining. EDF and China General Nuclear (CGN) — both backed by their governments — are building the £22bn Hinkley plant. After spending £2bn, Hitachi halted development of its Horizon plant on Anglesey, and unless there is taxpayers’ cash to absorb some of the risks, it could sell the site. Hitachi’s board is due to decide in September.
Without a state support package, EDF will struggle to build the planned Sizewell C in Suffolk. That would leave CGN as the only developer capable of going it alone without UK taxpayer support.
China’s nuclear ambitions in the UK are part of President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road initiative to achieve global dominance through money, technology and influence. Its aim is to install its Hualong One (HPR1000) reactors at Bradwell on the Essex coast, and use the UK as a showpiece for its tech, posing another dilemma for ministers. America is adamant that the UK should not allow the communist state a role in an area as sensitive as nuclear power. Westminster thus has an invidious choice: accept China’s cash, stump up taxpayer funds — or give up on nuclear altogether.
Nuclear increasingly struggles to make the case for its big sticker price compared with renewables. EDF has a guaranteed price of £92.50 per megawatt hour (MWh) for its electricity for 35 years. Offshore wind has fallen as low as £39.65 per MWh.
Is that a fair comparison? As the rise of renewables has split power generation into a multitude of small sources, hidden costs have been passed on to consumers.
Coal and nuclear power stations help to keep the grid stable. Their big steam turbines, spinning at 3,000 revolutions per minute, provide the grid with inertia, keeping on spinning even when a reactor powers down — vital to maintaining the grid’s 50 hertz frequency.
Wind and solar provide very little inertia — they can stop generating electricity almost instantly, causing a drop in the grid’s frequency.
The perils of a sharp frequency drop were demonstrated in August. Power was cut to almost a million people, trains were stranded and a hospital in Ipswich blacked out when a wind farm and a gas power station stopped working almost simultaneously.
To insure against that fragility, myriad different power sources, such as batteries and hydroelectric plants, are paid handsomely to provide back-up and spark into life should the frequency fall. Those costs will only rise as more unstable generation is plugged in.
Fiona Reilly, a non-executive director at the Nuclear Industry Association, said: “The total system costs need to be considered when looking at the price of electricity. A ‘point in time’ strike price does not provide that.” She said offshore wind turbines will need to be located in deeper waters as shallow sites fill up, meaning costlier floating platforms.
Nor are batteries likely to prove the answer. The largest lithium-ion battery on the planet, Elon Musk’s 100MW beast in Australia, can power Adelaide, a city of 1.3 million people — but only for minutes.
If anything, Britain is likely to need more generation as it replaces domestic gas heating with electricity, and petrol and diesel vehicles are swapped for battery-powered ones. The Committee on Climate Change says that up to 645 terawatt hours (TWh) of low-carbon generation will be needed by 2050. Last year the UK generated about 324 TWh of electricity, of which about 176 TWh came from low-carbon sources.
“From now to 2050, we must replace or repower almost all our current generating capacity and build almost twice as much again to meet the anticipated increased demand,” said the engineering firm Atkins.
There are signs that ministers may finally be about to act. The prime minister’s adviser Dominic Cummings is thought to be a fan of small nuclear power stations, and Boris Johnson hinted about a role for nuclear last week.
How to pay for it remains the question. Ministers may have to accept that the plants’ cost goes on the state balance sheet during construction. At a time of parlous government finances, that would be bitter.
“You won’t get remotely close to big ‘net zero’ by 2050 without big nuclear power,” said a senior industry adviser. “We are at a crossroads. This is the last chance saloon.”
Taxpayers are about to find out whether billions of pounds will be pumped into nuclear power. Yet the cost of doing nothing may prove to be even bigger.