Western countries overly ‘optimistic’ in nuclear project delivery
The western world is too “optimistic” with nuclear project build and delivery times, creating problems from start to finish, a nuclear industry luminary has warned.
Speaking ahead of the inaugural global nuclear summit this week in Brussels Ian Edwards, chief executive of AtkinsRealis said Western countries get too carried away with trying to deliver the project quickly that planning and strategy falls by the wayside.
“Clients, governments and ourselves as the industry players … we all become too optimistic … we have this optimism bias towards being able to deliver faster,” he told the Financial Times.
AtkinsRealis, which Edwards has headed up for nearly five years, is the world’s largest maker of reactors that run on natural uranium.
Lincoln Hill, the UK’s Nuclear Industry Association’s director of policy and external affairs, concurred with his assessment.
“It is vital we focus on design maturity before construction, that means minimising regulatory changes with proven designs and by replicating those proven designs again and again,” he told CityAM
“Large or small reactors, that’s the template to get nuclear done faster and cheaper, the UK hasn’t applied that lesson before but we need to now.”
The UK’s nuclear industry has long been crying out for a more targeted and well-funded approach to development of the sector as a viable pathway to net zero targets.
Power output from nuclear energy sources sank to a 40-year low last year and the progress of two major reactor projects Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C, has been repeatedly stymied by sky-high costs and planning delays.
Hinkley is now looking at a completion date of 2029 at the earliest, four years past due and at more than double the original £18bn scoped cost.
Sizewell, meanwhile, is embroiled in an ownership debacle alongside ballooning costs.
Though both are owned outright by France’s state-run electricity company EDF, the French government is lobbying the UK government to share the burden of the cost increases after the former’s Chinese partner on the project, CGN, was removed over security fears.
More recently, banking giant HSBC was reportedly leading the charge on putting together an investment groupp to buy into the project.
At the outset of this year, the government published its long-awaited nuclear road map that promised competition tenders for developers to roll out small module reactors, or SMRs, as well as another Sizewell C-sized reactor.
However the government was forced to complete an embarrassing u-turn, announced in the chancellor’s Spring Budget, of buying back two sites that Japanese technology giant Hitachi had earmarked for development.
Hampered by the rocketing costs, however, the firm pulled the plug on advancing the project two years ago.