I have been blogging lately about the Hinkley Point C reactor project in the U.K. This is a complex deal involving the British, the French and the Chinese. The French company EDF will construct the two reactors while the Chinese will help with finances. One aspect of the deal is the possibility that the Chinese will be allowed to build a reactor of their own design in England at Bradwell in Essex with Chinese labor. Many groups in England opposed the project on a variety of grounds including labor issue, environment concerns, finances and security.
The project has opened a big rift in the environmental movement in England. Some environmentalists have been supporting nuclear power as a way to reduce carbon emissions. Other environmentalists vehemently oppose any expansion of nuclear power on the grounds of cost as well as threats to the environment and public health. A recent article in the Ecologist, part of the Guardian Environmental Network, outlined the charges leveled at the pro-nuclear environmentalists by the anti-nuclear environmentalists.
The support for nuclear power by some environmentalists has confused the public. This support may have been the decisive factor in the acceptance of the Hinkley Point C project by the British government. Friends of the Earth did support nuclear power on climate change grounds for a time but has recently reversed its stance and now publicly opposes the Hinkley Point C project.
Critics of the project pointed out to the pro-nuclear supporters that even if nuclear power might be useful in climate change mitigation, the specific technologies being planned for Hinkley Point C were suspect. The only reactors based on the French EPR design to be built so far have encountered significant and costly design and construction problems. Pro-nuclear supporters in Britain have recently admitted that Hinkley Point C is " overpriced, overcomplicated and overdue" and that, "The Government should kill the project."
The pro-nuclear environmentalists were warned that their support for nuclear power would deal a serious blow to the development of sustainable alternative power in the U.K. The critics point out that the government has dumped the zero-carbon agenda for the built environment, has ridiculed the idea of energy efficiency and destroyed any chance that the U.K. will meet its obligations under the Climate Change Act.
The anti-nuclear environmentalists say that the pro-nuclear group's support has helped pave the way for the Chinese nuclear industry to assume a leading role in the development of nuclear power in the U.K. This has serious implications for nuclear security and regulation in the U.K. and may ultimately prove disastrous for the citizenry.
The global nuclear industry has a very bad track record of ignoring regulations, ignoring public safety, incompetence, construction short cuts, bribery and other serious crimes and breaches of public trust. The contracts for nuclear power reactors involve huge sums of money and are often connected explicitly or implicitly to nuclear weapons programs. Once struck, these deals are almost always over budget, behind schedule and extremely hard to cancel. The construction and operation of a nuclear power reactor commits the government and the citizenry of a country to around a century of regulation, danger and escalating costs.
The government of the U.K. is responsible for the Hinkley Point C deal but the anti-nuclear environmentalists believe that they might not have been able to proceed without sufficient public support from misguided pro-nuclear environmentalists who are now against the Hinkley Point C project. The pro-nuclear group recently said, " We urge the Government to scrap this plant (Hinkley C), and use the money promised to its investors to accelerate the deployment of other low carbon technologies, both renewable and nuclear. We would like to see the Government produce a comparative study of nuclear technologies, including the many proposed designs for small modular reactors, and make decisions according to viability and price, rather than following the agenda of the companies which have its ear."
