What the commentators said

There’s no denying that Hitachi’s decision is a “disastrous setback”, said Alex Brummer in the Daily Mail. It’s all very well to talk of alternatives to nuclear, but wind power is only of use when there’s enough wind to keep the turbines spinning. And we can’t rely on natural gas to provide back-up power: we are mainly reliant on the suppliers in Russia or the Middle East, linked to the UK by pipelines passing through dangerously unstable regions. Yet if we have to stick with nuclear how will we fund it? We could turn to the Chinese to replace the lost Japanese cash: they’re already financing Hinkley Point C. But do we really want to jeopardise national security by allowing ever greater Chinese involvement in our vital infrastructure? Our leaders, distracted by Brexit, are ignoring a crisis that could leave us in the cold and dark. The best hope lies in new technologies that can deal with the intermittent nature of renewables, said Josh Gabbatiss in The Independent, in particular in giant batteries able to store supplies of electricity from green sources. But it will take time and major investment for these to become a reality: until then, both main parties agree that nuclear must remain part of our energy mix.

The problem is that nuclear isn’t a commercial proposition, said Alastair Osborne in The Times. It’s a “last millennium technology” replete with incalculable risks and costs. It’s no accident that state-owned French and Chinese companies are building Hinkley Point C, and even then, Britain had to bribe them with the promise of lavishly high prices for their output. The simplest alternative is to build new gas-fired plants, said Andy Critchlow in The Daily Telegraph: the fuel is plentiful, less grubby than coal and competitively priced. Nor does it carry the risk of existential catastrophe: fears of another Fukushima partly explain why nuclear’s share of global electricity supply fell from a peak of 17.6% in 2006 to 10.3% in 2017. If the Hitachi episode forces the Government to reconsider the gas alternative, it could end up “a blessing in disguise”.