Hinkley Point C ‘is no nuclear option for the UK and its technology is untested and obsolete’
Its cost is outrageous, its delays are obscene and the project must be cancelled so that the UK can start fracking
THERE is nothing wrong with nuclear power. It’s safer, cleaner, more reliable and takes up less room than any other form of electricity generation.
And it could be cheaper, too, if we mass-produced small reactors in factories rather than built them one vast project at a time like Egyptian pyramids.
But Hinkley Point C in Somerset must be cancelled.
Its cost is outrageous, its delays are obscene and its technology is, bizarrely, both untested and obsolete.
That is to say, nowhere in the world is the European Pressurised Reactor technology operating yet — the
Finnish and French projects are years behind schedule and billions over budget — and new orders for it have dried up.
Hinkley will be the last of its kind.
If it goes ahead, British consumers will be forced to pay back the French and Chinese state-owned businesses that are to build it — by forking out nearly three times the current price of electricity for 35 years. Ouch.
Subsidy has rocketed from £6.1billion to £29.7billion
According to the National Audit Office, the estimated cost of the subsidy has rocketed from £6.1billion to £29.7billion in just THREE years.
That’s because the price of the alternative — gas — has come down.
Yet this possibility had not occurred to the Labour and Lib Dem ministers (Ed Miliband, Chris Huhne and Ed Davey) who ran the unlamented Department of Climate Change (sorry, “Energy and Climate Change”, though none of them thought energy a priority).
DECC had three scenarios for fossil fuel prices — that they would go up slowly, fast or very fast. This, they said, was because gas was running out.
So, hey presto, the high price being charged for Hinkley’s electricity, and for even costlier offshore wind farms, would look cheap compared with power produced from gas by 2017 — when Hinkley was originally supposed to start operating.
Instead, gas and oil prices plummeted because of the discovery of how to get extraordinary quantities of both from shale rocks, first in Texas then all over America, using horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”.
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When I went to see shale gas operations in Pennsylvania in 2011, and realised how they were getting better and better at squeezing vast amounts of gas and oil from cracks a millimetre wide in rocks a mile deep, I came away convinced that the world of energy was about to change forever.
I wrote a report on it for the think-tank the Global Warming Policy Foundation and tried to tell ministers, but they weren’t interested. “It’s a flash in the pan”, was the general view then.
The shale firms are continually improving the speed and cost of drilling a well
But it wasn’t.
America, far from becoming dependent on imported fossil fuels, quickly became a huge producer and even an exporter of oil and gas, driving down prices worldwide.
The Saudis turned on the taps to try to bankrupt the American shale men, but they failed. The shale firms are continually improving the speed and cost of drilling a well, and the amount of gas or oil they can get out.
This August, gas production per drilling rig in Pennsylvania was an astonishing 18 per cent higher than last year.
Oil production in Texas and Oklahoma is hitting new records, despite the low price.
Here in Britain, we have one of the richest reserves of shale gas ever found, a mile beneath the surface of Lancashire and Yorkshire. There’s enough to last many decades, possibly centuries.
Just one drilling rig, operating for a few weeks, can unleash a flow of energy for 25 years equivalent to that from a dozen gigantic wind turbines, but more reliable.
Gas is the cheapest and most flexible way to make electricity. Unlike wind, it’s there when you need it.
Unlike solar power it works at night.
Unlike nuclear, it can be switched on quickly when everybody gets home from work. Unlike coal it is comparatively clean. Unlike wood pellets, it does not require transporting by rail.
And unlike tidal, it does not require the ruination of estuaries.
For disclosure, I have a commercial interest in coal, but not in gas.
So why is nobody building a gas-fired power station in Britain today?
Unlike wind, solar and nuclear, gas is there when you need it
Because subsidised wind farms have destroyed the economic return on such an investment.
Not because they are cheaper, but because once they are built — at great expense to consumers through subsidies — they can dump electricity on the market at low prices when the wind blows.
Gas, being flexible, has to stop operating.
Nobody wants to build a plant that has to shut down at irregular intervals.
So let’s get fracking and build some gas power stations while we work out how to make nuclear power cheap.
Matt Ridley is a journalist, businessman and the author of books including The Evolution Of Everything: How Ideas Emerge.