Part 3 of 5 Parts (Please read Parts 1 and 2 first)
     Andrew Stirling talks about the “tragic relative popularity of (increasingly obsolescent) nuclear weapons”. Civil nuclear installations are crumbling and this provides a fortuitous opportunity to shift some of the costs for nuclear infrastructure that might be useful for the military over to the civilian nuclear program. The U.K. has copious stores of plutonium and the U.K. military has its own dedicated uranium enrichment logistics.
      Tom Burke is the Chairman of E3G which is a think tank. He said, “Clearly, the military need to maintain both reactor construction and operation skills and access to fissile materials will remain. I can well see the temptation for Defense Ministers to try to transfer this cost to civilian budgets.”
      Dr David Toke is a Reader in Energy Politics, Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Aberdeen. He says that the global threat of nuclear proliferation is strongly linked to the spread of nuclear power. David Lowry agrees with Toke. He said that “India, Pakistan and above all Israel are obvious examples, each of which certainly has built nuclear weapons.”
     Stirling believes that we cannot separate the work of challenging civil nuclear power programs without also challenging military nuclear interests. He said, “The massive expense of increasingly ineffective military nuclear systems extends beyond the declared huge budgets. They are also propped up by large hidden subsidies from consumer and taxpayer payments for costly nuclear power.  Huge hidden military interests will likely continue to keep the civil nuclear monster growing new arms. Until critics reach out and engage the entire thing, we’ll never prevail in either struggle.” It is still unclear how the U.K. will pay for expensive new nuclear power plants.
     The Office of the Prime Minister is strongly backing the development and deployment of SMRs. In the meantime, BEIS has been trying to find a way to pay for the Sizewell C reactor which the French company, EDF, has been promoting for construction in Suffolk. Analysts think that this may be part of the reason that it did not want to take part in the financing of Rolls Royce’s expansion.
     BEIS has been considering and promoting the idea of the U.K. government taking equity stakes in future U.K. nuclear power plants such as Sizewell C. This has been confirmed by the U.K. energy minister.
     EDF is not able to continue with its plans to construct a new U.K. nuclear power setation unless it receives even more U.K. government support than it has already obtained. Jean-Bernard Lévy is the CEO of EDF. He recently met the Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak to plead for more funding from the U.K. government. John Sauven is the head of Greenpeace in the U.K. He wrote a letter to the Chancellor in which he argued that while the requested support might be in the interests of EDF, it certainly would not be in the interests of the U.K.
Please read Part 4 next