A rust-colored dome towers over the muddy fields of Hinkley Point, a headland overlooking the Bristol Channel in southwest England.
When a giant yellow crane lifted the 150-foot-wide concrete and steel saucer into place this winter, it marked a milestone for what will be Britain’s first commercial nuclear power station since the mid-1990s and a flagship effort revitalization of the sector.
However, the cap on the first of the twin cylindrical reactor buildings was also a reminder of the amazing, long and increasingly expensive effort to build what is known as Hinkley Point C.
Work on the plant has been underway for more than a decade, but completion remains years away.
Recently, Électricité de France, the French state-owned utility building the plant, warned of even more delays. The launch date, which two years ago was planned for 2027, has been pushed back to the end of this decade or perhaps 2031.
The extra time will add billions more to a final bill that could reach 47.9 billion pounds, or about $60 billion, EDF said. In 2016, the price was pegged at £18 billion.
Nuclear power is regaining favor in the West as a tool to reduce greenhouse gases, and the British government last month announced the “largest expansion of nuclear power in 70 years”. But the track record of nuclear power in Western Europe and the United States is not encouraging, with delays and surprising cost overruns plaguing recent projects. The fate of Hinckley Point and another project, planned on England’s east coast in the village of Sizewell, could determine whether Britain’s nuclear momentum accelerates or decelerates.
“The hype is at an all-time high,” said Franck Gbaguidi, a nuclear analyst at Eurasia Group, a political risk firm. “Governments will over-promise and under-deliver.”
In what executives say is an all-out effort to complete by 2030, EDF has 11,000 people at Hinckley working around the clock. Welders, engineers and electricians, employed by multiple contractors, are flown to the site in a fleet of white buses from a logistics center and temporary flats around the fading industrial town of Bridgewater.
There are “a lot of workers on site at the same time,” said Susan Goss, vice-chairman of Stogursey Parish Council, the local district. “I think it could very well be difficult to coordinate what they’re doing,” he added.
Britain was once a pioneer in splitting atoms to produce electricity, building an early series of reactors in the 1950s and 1960s, but the country has not completed a nuclear power plant in nearly 30 years.
“The U.K. and the U.S. have, in a sense, forgotten how to build nuclear power,” said Simon Taylor, a professor at Cambridge University’s Judge Business School who has written extensively on Britain’s nuclear program. “We may rebuild this knowledge, but it will take a long time,” he added.
Nuclear plants are incredibly complex structures and Britain lacks both a workforce with the right skills and contractors who are experienced in the choreography of the tasks that make up a well-executed project, Mr Taylor and other analysts said. In addition, Britain’s process for certifying and licensing one of these facilities is painstakingly thorough, costing would-be developers billions.
For a programmer, it was too much. In 2019, Japanese group Hitachi pulled out of a nuclear project in Wales after spending £2bn. The company blamed cost escalation.
In 2008, when Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government began its current push to build nuclear plants, a government study suggested new power plants could be sending electricity to the grid by 2018.
Since then, only Hinkley Point has reached an advanced stage, while Britain’s nuclear capacity has fallen by more than 40 percent as aging units are phased out, according to the Nuclear Industry Association, a trade group. In the past year, nuclear plants provided about 14 percent of the country’s electricity, compared with 21 percent a decade ago.
“Re-learning nuclear skills, creating a new supply chain and training the workforce has been a huge task,” Stuart Crooks, Hinkley Point’s chief executive, said in a recent memo to staff.
Adding to the problem: The type of reactors being built at Hinkley Point has a reputation for being problematic. The British government allowed EDF to buy most of Britain’s existing nuclear power system in 2009, and the company chose a design that helped develop the French nuclear industry, known as the European Pressurized Reactor, to build at Hinkley Point.
Touted as one of the safest and most powerful reactors ever built, the design is now notorious for flaws, delays and cost overruns, especially at the facilities at Olkiluoto in Finland, which began operating in 2023, and Flamanville in France, which is expected to go live on the Internet. This year.
In theory, developers learn lessons each time they build a plant, reducing future costs, but this process does not appear to have been fully successful with the reactors at Hinkley, which are the fifth and sixth of this design.
Roy Pumfrey, spokesman for Stop Hinkley, a group opposed to the plant, believes it is “doomed” never to be completed. “The design of the reactor is very complex,” said Mr Pumfrey, a retired teacher.
In his message, EDF’s Mr Crooks placed additional blame for delays and cost overruns on Britain’s nuclear regulations. In order to meet the requirements, Mr. Crooks said, the original design would have needed 7,000 changes, including 35 percent more steel and 25 percent more concrete. EDF is owned by the French government.
Britain’s Office for Nuclear Regulation quickly responded, saying in a Jan. 25 statement that it had called for changes following the 2011 Fukushima accident in Japan as well as experiences with other European pressurized reactors in Europe and China. As for added concrete and steel, the regulator said France had similar requirements.
However, there is evidence that building a nuclear plant takes longer and costs more in Britain. Britain Remade, a group that aims to accelerate economic growth, found that similar reactors had been built much more cheaply – not only in China, which leads the world in building nuclear plants, but also in Finland and France, despite delays there.
“It is clear that our approach to reactor design and financing adds significant costs,” two analysts, Sam Dumitriu and Ben Hopkinson, wrote in a recent study.
Despite the disappointments, nuclear power is gaining political support in Britain and elsewhere as a reliable source of low-emissions energy. If completed, Hinkley Point C will power six million homes – more than two and a half times the next largest UK nuclear power station. And the stable nature of nuclear power is an important feature. Renewable energy sources such as wind and solar are intermittent.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak recently announced an extra £1.3 billion to help fund EDF’s construction of its Sizewell plant, known as Sizewell C.
“Nuclear power is the perfect antidote to the energy challenges facing Britain,” Mr Sunack said last month when he announced a plan to quadruple nuclear power generation by 2050.
Who will pay for this extension? This is not exactly clear.
The British government is now the main owner of Sizewell C, having bought out a minority stake held by China General Nuclear, a Chinese state-owned company. EDF has cut its stake to less than 50 percent from 80 percent and says it is determined to reduce it below 20 percent. EDF and the UK government hope that lessons learned at Hinkley Point C will reduce the cost of Sizewell C, which is the same design.
The government, on the advice of Barclays Bank, is in talks with a group of investors to buy the Sizewell plant. As an enticement, officials are offering a new financing model that will allow developers to recoup their investments sooner.
A few years ago, Chinese companies were expected to play a large role in Britain’s nuclear program, but the British government has weighed in on their involvement. China General still owns about a third of Hinkley Point C but has stopped contributing to construction costs, according to EDF, leaving French cronies to pay for work to continue. China’s general did not respond to a request for comment. On Friday, EDF said it was writing off about $13.9 billion for the project.
With so much at stake for Britain, EDF and the French government hope Mr Sunak will be more involved to help complete Hinkley Point and make the next plant a success.
“It is in the interests of the British authorities that we are a stable partner, to deliver the project in the best condition,” said Luc Rémont, EDF’s chief executive. “And so I am confident that we will find a path with the UK authorities at both Hinkley Point and Sizewell.”
Keith Bradcher contributed to the report from Beijing and Liz Alderman from Paris.
