Saved in the ‘Nick’ of time from the world’s most expensive power station?

In the nick of time, it seems, a glimmer of sanity is at last breaking in on what I have long been describing as the most insane single project a British government has ever put its hand to. We can credit the decision to put on hold our agreement for EDF to build the most expensive power station in the world, at Hinkley Point, to Theresa May’s joint chief of staff, Nick Timothy. This was the man who, having back in April described the Climate Change Act as “a monstrous act of self-harm”, was also behind the abolition of the Department for Energy and Climate Change (Decc).

Until now, the absurd story of Hinkley has been as vivid an example of the self-deluding power of groupthink as could be imagined. All those ministers swept along by it, such as Ed Miliband, Chris Huhne and Ed Davey, should hang their heads in shame. This culminated in that humiliating spectacle last year (as also noted by Mr Timothy) when David Cameron and George Osborne invited the President of China to London in October and begged him to lend us billions of pounds to buy a reactor design so flawed that it could almost certainly never be built.

Nothing should have brought this home more forcefully, as I noted last year, than the contrast between the Hinkley project and the way South Korea is building four nuclear reactors for the United Arab Emirates, to an already proven design and at only a fraction of the cost.

Although the UAE began talks with Korea only in 2009, the year we began negotiating with EDF for its two 1600 megawatt (MW) reactors at Hinkley, the four 1400 MW reactors for the UAE (hence their name APR1400s) are already under construction, with the first due onstream next year and the rest to follow by 2020. For £15 billion, they will thus supply 5600 MW of electricity, much more than Hinkley’s 3200 MW, so grotesquely subsidised that even Decc admits its cost could eventually be £37 billion.

This is the dreadful fiasco from which, in “the Nick” of time, it seems we may now be saved. Of course we desperately need reliable nuclear power to make up for the inadequacy of all those intermittent wind turbines. But we should forget about the French and Chinese and get on the phone to Korea as fast as possible.

We should also be looking hard at “mini-nukes ”, using industrially produced small nuclear reactors similar to those which will be powering our Trident submarines. But that is a story for another day.

A CGI image from French energy company EDF of what the nuclear power station, Hinkley Point C, in Somerset, would look like, were it ever to be built. Even Decc admits it could cost £37 billion