17
Sizewell C power station to be built as part of UK’s £14bn nuclear investment
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2025
17 points (94.7% liked)
United Kingdom
4944 readers
104 users here now
General community for news/discussion in the UK.
Less serious posts should go in !casualuk@feddit.uk or !andfinally@feddit.uk
More serious politics should go in !uk_politics@feddit.uk.
Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
And yet Hinkley C was approved in 2010 and is still not finished, current cost is at 3 times the orginal budget and ETA is now 2030 from originally 2023 (and may slip further).
What's worse is they contract in a fixed price for the power generated which is way higher than renewables can generate it for. So we're paying more for our electricity.
Also consider how much renewables that investment could buy; its not just 31billon of today money that will start to see some benefit 20 years after it was started.
Classic Britain
Afaik it's headed by EDF so my current supplier is bound to expand some profit margins
If we're not doing anything that the Tories mismanaged over the past 15 years the list of things to do is going to be very short.
Sure, but the business case for a nuclear plant straight up doesnt stack up unless you're weighing some parameter other than the best interests of the public. The facts on the costs and timelines are sitting right there.
Build out renewables - you get faster power on the grid (a couple of years vs a couple of decades) AND the power is cheaper. LOTS cheaper.
Sorry no. France has proven the case for nuclear as a business many times over.
And for all the benefits of renewable. It has one huge disadvantage. We cannot control availability. So either storage (takes more space then the UK has. Or harmful materials for battery's. Or some form of power plant that can be turned on or of with demand.
Nuclear is by far the cleanest that meets that goal. Until STEP is proven at large scale. (We are now building a full size fusion plant so post 2040 that looks likely).
It really is the best option.
What happens when it's not windy or sunny? Burning gas. Sure it's expensive and will be late but nuclear is not in stead of more renewables, it's in addition to. They also pledged to double the amount of offshore wind (which already makes up around 20% of UK energy) in the same announcement.
There are grid connection delays of 8 to 10 years for lots of renewable energy projects, as the grid wasnt designed to have many small inputs, so its not like there arent issues there too, and thats before you start getting into reliability issues once the percentage of non-dispatachable energy gets higher.
In general both need to be invested in heavily, and structural reforms done, if we have a chance of actually meeting climate goals. Thankfully that seems to be the plan.
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing. Funny enough, the article mentions 54 billion of investment on the national grid is needed over the next 10 years, and hinkley point currently costs 31!
I guess they do this due to the enormous amount of investment needed to build a nuclear power station, so need some way of guaranteeing returns on it?
If funded by private investment. Yep.
If funded as tax payer investment in important inferstructure. Nope
Which is exactly why this is a bad choice