Plans for nuclear plants in Britain face fresh uncertainty after government advisers warned against backing costly new reactors.
The nuclear industry wants the government to commit to a funding system to back the construction of reactors, including EDF’s proposed Sizewell plant in Suffolk.
However, the National Infrastructure Commission, set up in 2015 to provide impartial advice to the government, reiterated concerns in a report about backing more nuclear plants.
It noted that there had been cost reductions in renewable power technologies such as wind and solar over the past ten years, but “costs of building and running nuclear power stations have not fallen consistently, even in countries that have built fleets of similar reactors”.
Given the potential for other non-intermittent technologies to complement renewables, it said that this “weakened the case for committing to a new fleet of nuclear power stations”.
The commission’s intervention comes almost two years after it first urged caution on new nuclear plants.
The Nuclear Industry Association wrote to the chancellor this week saying that there was an urgent need for “a new, robust financing mechanism” to support new nuclear plants. It said that the timing was “critical” because the business case for EDF’s proposed Sizewell C plant was “dependent on the transfer of operations in a timely fashion from Hinkley Point C”, the plant the group is building in Somerset.
Ministers launched a consultation on using EDF’s preferred “regulated asset base” model to support new nuclear development last summer, but have yet to decide whether to proceed with it.
Rishi Sunak had been expected to respond to the infrascture commission’s 2018 report with a new strategy alongside his budget next week, but the BBC reported that this had been delayed.