Only China wants to invest in Britain's new £2bn Hinkley Point nuclear plant because no one else thi

[bananas]

Source: Independent

Delays and cost overruns at two nuclear reactors under construction in France and Finland have made potential investors wary of joining a consortium led by France's EDF for a similar project in Britain, EDF's chief executive has admitted.

The French utility plans to build two European Pressurised Reactors (EPRs) at Hinkley Point with two Chinese partners, but it has been unable to find other investors for the 16 billion pound project.

"For third parties observing the announcements of delays and cost overruns for the EPRs under construction, it is difficult to commit," Jean-Bernard Levy told French financial daily Les Echos.

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Levy confirmed comments by British finance minister George Osborne who said China could build and own a nuclear power plant in Britain in the future.

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Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/only-china-wants-to-invest-in-britains-new-2bn-hinkley-point-nuclear-plant-because-no-one-else-thinks-it-will-work-edf-admits-10513752.html

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The full title is truncated by DU software, the full title is:

"Only China wants to invest in Britain's new £2bn Hinkley Point nuclear plant because no one else thinks it will work, EDF admits"

and that last part is what makes this LBN: EDF publicly admitting that all the major European contractors and investors pulled out because they all did their own independent analysis and realized this is a disastrous boondoggle.

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1. We are pro-nuclear, but Hinkley C must be scrapped: George Monbiot, Mark Lynas, and Chris Goodall

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/18/we-are-pro-nuclear-but-hinkley-c-must-be-scrapped

We are pro-nuclear, but Hinkley C must be scrapped

Overpriced, overcomplicated and overdue, the Hinkley project needs to be killed off and the money invested into other low-carbon technologies

George Monbiot, Mark Lynas, and Chris Goodall

Friday 18 September 2015


As committed environmentalists, our conversion to the cause of nuclear power was painful and disorienting. All of us carried a cost in changing our position, antagonising friends and alienating colleagues. But we believe that shutting down – or failing to replace – our primary source of low carbon energy during a climate emergency is a refined form of madness.

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Now, however, we are about to antagonise a different faction, by arguing that the UK’s only proposed nuclear power plant, Hinkley C in Somerset, should not be built.

Hinkley C bears all the distinguishing features of a white elephant: overpriced, overcomplicated and overdue. The delay that was announced recently should be the final straw. The government should kill the project.

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So how do the operators, the French company EDF, expect Hinkley C – even if it can be built – to be economically viable? By extracting from the government a price guarantee of £92.50 per megawatt hour for the electricity it produces, index-linked for 35 years.

This is simply astronomical. It is more than twice the current wholesale price of electricity, and more than the government is now paying for solar power, whose costs are expected to fall greatly during the lifetime of the nuclear plant. Against current prices, the government’s guarantee represents a subsidy of over £1 billion a year.

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But perhaps the greatest problem Hinkley C imposes is energy blight. As the project is delayed, the power it would otherwise have generated is likely to be supplied instead by fossil fuel plants. If it does indeed turn out to be unconstructable, the result is likely to be a panicked scramble back into gas and even, perhaps, coal.

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[Divernan]

2. Humongous cost overrides on US nuclear plants were passed on to consumers

as stranded costs.

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3. UK guarantees £2bn nuclear plant deal as China investment announced

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-somerset-

UK guarantees £2bn nuclear plant deal as China investment announced

21 September 2015

Chancellor George Osborne has announced that the UK will guarantee a £2bn deal under which China will invest in the Hinkley Point nuclear power station.

Mr Osborne, who is in China, said the deal would pave the way for a final investment decision on the delayed project by French energy company EDF.

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In February, the firm announced that it had pushed back its decision on whether to invest in the plant.

It cannot afford the estimated £24.5bn cost of the plant on its own, so has been looking for financial partners to invest, particularly in China. This has proved difficult, which is why the government has had to step in to guarantee part of the cost.

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4. Bombs Ahoy! Why the UK is desperate for nuclear power

http://www.theecologist.org/blogs_and_comments/commentators/2530828/bombs_ahoy_why_the_uk_is_desperate_for_nuclear_power.html

Bombs Ahoy! Why the UK is desperate for nuclear power

Oliver Tickell
26th August 2014

On the face of it, the UK government's obsession with nuclear power defies reason. It's very expensive, inflexible, creates 'existential' threats and imposes enormous 'long tail' liabilities tens of thousands of years into the future. But there is a simple explanation: it's all to maintain the UK's status as a nuclear WMD state.

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But why is a civil nuclear programme so important to having a nuclear WMD programme? Here are some reasons:

• to maintain nuclear WMD we need a substantial pool of nuclear physicists, engineers, University departments, professors, graduates, technicians, etc;
  
  
• it would be very expensive to sustain this whole nuclear establishment purely for the sake of a WMD programme - far better to spread out the costs with a civil nuclear programme which ends up bearing most of the costs;
  
  
• nuclear science and engineering would offer unattractive and insecure career prospects if tied exclusively to employment on nuclear WMD;
  
  
• it's important to be able to spread out the costs of the entire nuclear fuel cycle from uranium sourcing and enrichment through to disposal of wastes so that a nuclear WMD programme can piggy-back at low cost on a much larger civil nuclear programme.
  

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It also means that the two main anti-nuclear campaigning factions - anti-nuclear power and anti-nuclear WMD - are really a single movement with a common aim. Without either one, the other will become significantly weaker, unviable, and ultimately die.

And this knowledge arms us with an important new argument against the so called 'nuclear greens' such as George Monbiot, Mark Lynas, Bryony Worthington and Stephen Tindale. They may sincerely believe that nuclear power is the answer to climate change - however hard it is to understand quite how they reached that counter-factual conclusion.

But point out to them that by supporting nuclear power they are actually backing nuclear weapons - and in the process a discredited, outdated, genocidal world order based on the capacity of nuclear WMD states to destroy the world - and their proposition rapidly gets a whole lot less sustainable.

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[bananas]

5. Shining a light on Britain’s nuclear state: Trident and the Hinkley boondoggle

An excellent article worth reading in full:

http://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2015/aug/07/shining-a-light-on-britains-nuclear-state

Shining a light on Britain’s nuclear state

Debates over Trident and energy policy are rarely joined up. But are there deeper links between Britain’s nuclear deterrent and its commitment to nuclear power?

Phil Johnstone and Andy Stirling
Friday 7 August 2015 06.58 EDT

Two momentous issues facing David Cameron’s government concern nuclear infrastructure. The new secretary of state for energy, Amber Rudd, recently confirmed her enthusiasm for what is arguably the most expensive infrastructure project in British history: the Hinkley Point C power station. At the same time, a decision is pressing on a similarly eye-watering commitment to renew Britain’s nuclear deterrent.

Ostensibly distinct, both of these issues are intensely controversial, extremely expensive, agonisingly protracted, and often accompanied by vicious political rhetoric. Yet commentators rarely ask how these decisions might be connected. Could such links help to explain the strength of the UK’s nuclear lobby? Britain remains one of only a handful of countries committed to a “nuclear renaissance”, with senior government figures asserting the manifest falsehood that there is “no alternative” to nuclear power. Meanwhile, support for renewables and energy efficiency has been cut.

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Yet there may be other clues. Looking back to the New Labour era, one may lie in the remarkable flurry of activity that immediately followed a rare and brief loss of control, in which the 2003 energy white paper firmly concluded nuclear power was “unattractive” – instead backing renewables and energy efficiency.

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What followed was one of the most spectacular U-turns in recent British politics. After only three years, a cursory further energy review was completed in 2006. Despite unchanged conditions and no new arguments, this reinstated a strongly pro-nuclear policy. Although the 2006 paper was itself overturned by judicial review on the grounds of being too superficial, the Blair government retorted that any further appraisal “won’t affect the policy at all”.

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What has not been examined until now is the intense policy commotion behind the scenes during this same period on the arcane topic of submarines. By 2004, the well-funded Keep Our Future Afloat Campaign (KOFAC) was underway. Run by a consortium of nuclear industry, trade union and nuclear-dependent local authorities, this was among the country’s most effective lobby groups. Aiming to maintain a UK nuclear submarine industry, KOFAC’s activities were not confined to the military sector. It also engaged enthusiastically in energy policy consultations, highlighting the importance of a shared skills pool for the military and civilian nuclear sectors.

Evidently commissioned following the off-piste 2003 nuclear white paper, a report was produced for the ministry of defence in 2005 by RAND Europe. This detailed the risks posed to UK nuclear submarine capabilities, and the deterrent more broadly, by a depleted workforce and skills base. Aided by KOFAC, the RAND study triggered a series of related documents from MoD and other security institutions. Defence select committee inquiries were undertaken and a new white paper was produced, reaffirming the commitment to a submarine-based nuclear deterrent. At the same time, anxious parliamentary briefings appeared, new research programmes were initiated – and regulatory agencies joined the clamour on the civilian side to “keep the nuclear option open”.

Joining these efforts, submarine producer BAE Systems set up a key suppliers group to improve co-ordination among nuclear contractors. This culminated in 2009, with the government launching the Nuclear Skills Institute whose remit again quietly spans the linkages between crucial skills across civilian and defence sectors.

So the links between UK civilian nuclear power and military interests in nuclear submarines run deep. What is remarkable is the complete lack of discussion these provoke in the media, public policy documents, or wider critical debate. Yet the stakes are very high. Does the commitment to a submarine based nuclear deterrent help to explain the intensity of high-level UK support for costly, risky and slow nuclear power, rather than cheaper, quicker and cleaner renewable technologies?

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