Part 1 of 2 Parts
The U.K. government has just announced the “biggest expansion of the nuclear sector in 70 years.” This follows years of extraordinarily expensive support for nuclear projects.
Official assessments acknowledge that nuclear power generation performs poorly compared to alternatives. With renewables and storage significantly cheaper and becoming even cheaper over time, climate goals can be achieved faster, more affordably and reliably by diverse other means. The only new nuclear power station under construction is still not finished, running ten years late and many times over budget.
Why does this questionable technology enjoy such intense and persistent generosity?
The U.K. government has failed to even to try to justify support for nuclear power in the kinds of detailed substantive energy terms that were once routine. The last properly rigorous energy generation white paper was in 2003.
Even before wind and solar costs plummeted to new lows, this report recognized nuclear as “unattractive.” The delayed 2020 white paper on power generation didn't detail any comparative nuclear and renewable costs, let alone justify why this more expensive option receives such disproportionate funding.
A document published with the latest announcement, Civil Nuclear: Roadmap to 2050, is also focused more on affirming official support than substantively justifying it. While supposedly a “civil” strategy, it contains multiple statements about addressing “civil and military nuclear ambitions” together to “identify opportunities to align the two across government.”
These pressures from the military side are acknowledged by other states with nuclear weapons, but were until now treated like a secret in the UK. Civil nuclear energy generation maintains the skills and supply chains needed for military nuclear programs.
Official U.K. energy policy documents fail to seriously justify nuclear power, but on the military side the picture is clear. For example, in 2006 then prime minister Tony Blair performed a total reversal to ignore his own white paper and pledge nuclear power would be “back with a vengeance.” Widely criticized for being based on a “secret” process, this white paper followed a major three volume study by the military-linked RAND Corporation for the Ministry of Defense (MoD) effectively warning that the U.K. “industrial base” for design, manufacture and maintenance of nuclear submarines would become unaffordable if the country phased out civil nuclear power.
A 2007 report from submarine-makers BAE Systems called for these military costs to be "masked" behind civil programs. A secret MoD report in 2014 (later released by freedom of information) showed clearly how declining nuclear power erodes military nuclear skills.
In multiple parliamentary hearings, academics, engineering organizations, research centers, industry bodies and trade unions have urged continuing civil nuclear power generation as a means to support military capabilities.
In 2017, submarine reactor manufacturer Rolls Royce even issued a report, marshaling the case for expensive “small modular reactors” to “relieve the MoD of the burden of developing and retaining skills and capability.”
The U.K. government itself has remained reluctant to acknowledge this pressure to “mask” military costs behind civilian nuclear programs. Yet the motive is clear in the repeated emphasis on the supposedly self-evident imperative to “keep the nuclear option open” - as if this were an end in itself, no matter what the cost. Energy ministers are occasionally more honest, with one calling civil-military distinctions “artificial” and quietly saying: “I want to include the MoD more in everything we do”.
Please read Part 2 next