The U.K. government has committed nineteen billion dollars of investment to build the new Sizewell C nuclear plant on the Suffolk coastline, ahead of the Spending Review.
Sizewell C will create ten thousand direct jobs, thousands more in firms supplying the plant and generate enough energy to power six million homes, the Treasury said.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves said that the “landmark decision” would “kickstart” economic growth, while Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said the investment was necessary to bring in a “golden age of clean energy”. He added the facility would be the “biggest nuclear building program in a generation”. He also said the investment was the “only way” to “take back control of our energy, and tackle the climate crisis”.
Alison Downes is the director of pressure group Stop Sizewell C. He said that ministers had not “come clean” about Sizewell C’s cost, because “negotiations with private investors are incomplete”.
The U.K. government insists that nuclear power provides enormous amounts of low-carbon, non-intermittent energy that forms a critical part of the government’s plans to almost completely eliminate fossil fuels from the U.K.’s energy grid by 2030.
Sizewell C will take at least a decade to become operational. Hinkley Point C in Somerset, the other new plant of which Sizewell C is a copy, will be turned on in the early 2030s. It is more than a decade late and will costs billions of dollars more than originally planned.
Alison Downes of Stop Sizewell C condemned the government’s announcement
In the 1990s, nuclear power generated about twenty five percent of the U.K.’s electricity. However, that figure has fallen to about fifteen percent with all but one of the U.K.’s existing nuclear fleet due to be decommissioned by 2030.
The previous U.K. Conservative government supported the construction of Sizewell C in 2022.
Since then, Sizewell C has had other sources of funding confirmed by the government, and in September 2023 a formal process to raise private investment was opened.
EDF, the French state-owned energy company, has a fifteen percent stake in Sizewell C. Representatives of EDF have met with U.K. ministers and said there were plenty of potential investors and they were close to finalizing an agreement on it.
The final investment decision on the funding model for the plant will be revealed later this summer. The Sizewell C project has faced serious opposition at the local and national level from those who believe it will prove to be a costly mistake. Downes said that she believed that the money could be spent on other priorities and feared the project would “add to consumer bills”. She said, “There still appears to be no final investment decision for Sizewell C but nineteen billion dollars in taxpayers’ funding is a decision we condemn and firmly believe the government will come to regret.” She added that “Starmer and Reeves have just signed up to HS2 mark 2,” referring to the railway project mired by years of budget disputes and delays. Large areas of land have already been cleared in preparation for the construction of Sizewell C
On Saturday, about three hundred protesters demonstrated on Sizewell beach against the project, with many concerned about how the plant would change the area’s environment.
The Sizewell C investment is the latest in a series of announcements in preparation for the government’s Spending Review, which will be unveiled on Wednesday. The review will include the chancellor setting out day-to-day spending and investment plans for each government department. A number of policies have already been announced. They include the U-turn on winter fuel payments, a commitment to increase defense spending, and investment in the science and technology sector. Once operational, Sizewell C is expected to employ nine hundred people.
The government also said it was investing three billion four hundred million dollars over five years into research and development for fusion energy and making investments into its defense nuclear sector.