The Government’s other confusion is to push for what appears to be a massive expansion of nuclear EPR pressurised-water reactors at the same time as offshore wind. This is incoherent.
Such forms of nuclear power are not dispatchable and cannot quickly adjust to peak periods. Nor do you require more base load power if renewables dominate the system. As National Grid said seven years ago, the concept of baseload is obsolete.
Again, this is entirely political. The Tory Net Zero Scrutiny Group has a fetish for Big Nuclear. Downing Street wants to toss them a £100bn bone, even though not a single EPR reactor is functioning anywhere in the world outside China, where one of the two in service has already gone wrong.
There is a high risk that these will be white elephants before they produce a single megawatt, a collective Millennium Dome on a ruinous scale, overtaken by the global race for small modular reactors using cheaper and more flexible technology.
The US Energy Department is funding development of high-temperature gas-cooled reactors that may deliver power sooner and at a fraction of the cost.
The Treasury is right to baulk at nuclear romanticism. If we are going to go for fission, we should focus on molten salt or other generation IV mini-reactors with moonshot designs that promise to consume our hazardous waste rather than generate more of it.
As for vested interests and assorted nostalgics hoping to roll back the net zero transition, they are likely to find that the world as a whole has reached the opposite conclusion about the current energy crisis. The shock has reminded the political class in most countries of just how expensive, volatile, and politically-dangerous fossil energy can be.
It is already clear that the paramount effect is to accelerate the push for solar and wind, already the cheapest form of new-build energy for three quarters of mankind. This episode will bring forward the Holy Grail of green hydrogen at $1 a kilo, at which point it wipes the floor.
Should the UK buck the trend – and so far Downing Street has not resiled from net zero – it will be relegated to a technological backwater, squandering one of the success stories of British industry over the last decade.
This country is among world leaders in clean electrolysis, fuel cells, offshore wind, carbon capture, blue hydrogen, and green shipping. These are bankable technologies on the global market.
The constant urge in certain quarters to belittle the achievement is almost pathological. Haven’t they got the message? Patriots and free marketeers wear bright green these days.
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