Bet on the French will not keep lights on

It is testament to the sheer incompetence of France’s statebacked utility EDF that Hinkley Point C has become Britain’s most radioactive construction project and it hasn’t even been built yet.

In fact, one wonders if it ever will be at this rate after yet more delays and cost overruns. For critics of atomic energy, Hinkley Point is the gift that keeps on giving. For the rest of the country it remains laughably elusive.

Remember EDF’S promise when it was lobbying to build Hinkley Point in 2007 that British families would be baking their Christmas turkeys using electricity from the plant in 2017? The only thing that is cooked thanks to EDF’S ineptitude is this country’s attempts to replace a slew of aging nuclear reactors with new ones.

After repeated setbacks, Britain’s first new plant in three decades was already scheduled to be nine years overdue and £7bn over budget having been pushed back to 2026, while estimated build costs had rocketed to £23bn.

And now? An announcement from EDF, snuck out at 10pm on Thursday night, reveals that the project has been delayed by another year at best, and will cost a further £3bn, with Covid the excuse. It is the fourth time that EDF has had to revise the timetable and budget since construction began in October 2016.

At this point, any suggestion that the Prime Minister’s recently announced ambition to build 24 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity, equivalent to another six Hinkleys, each costing £20bn, have any chance of being realised should be banished.

Ministers are taking us for fools with these grandiose yet delusional schemes. Like so many of this Government’s plans to transform important areas of the economy, Britain’s nuclear ambitions are totally divorced from reality, and will remain so while we continue to depend on the same unreliable partner with a risible track record of delivering on its promises.

It’s not just Hinkley where EDF has fallen short. Attempts to build the Neart na Gaoithe wind farm off Scotland’s Firth of Forth with Ireland’s ESB have suffered a series of delays.

But it is in France where the major red flags can be found. EDF’S flagship Flamanville plant in Normandy, which is being built using the same European Pressurised Reactors (EPR) that are set to be deployed at Hinkley, was meant to come on line in 2009. Instead, it won’t be ready until 2023 and is £10bn over budget after costs quadrupled from initial estimates in 2004.

At one point, France’s finance minister Bruno Le Maire was so frustrated with the Flamanville situation that he branded it a failure for France’s entire electricity and nuclear sector, and ordered EDF to “get back on track” for the sake of the country’s “energy security”. There was even talk of possible nationalisation.

Yet Flamanville is just one of many plants where EDF is experiencing problems. The company has been forced to check its entire fleet of 56 nuclear reactors after the discovery of corrosion caused outages at some.

A total of 12 are offline, exacerbating a perilous financial squeeze as EDF prepares to spearhead Emmanuel Macron’s plans to put nuclear power at the heart of his country’s pursuit of carbon neutrality by 2050.

The president has called for at least six new plants. Yet, at the same time, the government is also forcing EDF to sell some of its power at below-market prices to help consumers grappling with high energy prices.

After a profit warning in January where it forecast an €8bn (£7bn) hit from the new price cap, the company issued a second this week where it revealed an expected €18bn bill from a spate of outages.

And yet, incredibly, EDF harbours ambitions to build another plant in the UK, at Sizewell C in Suffolk.

The Government believes Britain needs baseload nuclear energy to counter the intermittency of renewable energy but it clearly can’t rely on the French to provide it. The trouble is, no one else wants to be involved, other than the Chinese state, but China General Nuclear faces being booted out of Britain’s nuclear programme as tensions with Beijing intensify.

Otherwise, it’s hard to detect a warm glow from other prospective investors for nuclear. Toshiba has scrapped plans for a plant in Cumbria, while Hitachi has mothballed new plants at Wylfa, Anglesey, and Oldbury, Gloucestershire. Meanwhile there is very little appetite in the City to back what is rightly seen as an industry that has a habit of creating financial black holes.

With Boris Johnson’s nuclear dreams in the hands of a failing French monopoly, they are already dead in the water. The Prime Minister wants 25pc of the country’s electricity to come from nuclear by 2050, a deadline that on past performance is likely to be greeted with familiar Gallic shrugs.

‘Britain’s nuclear ambitions are totally divorced from reality’