UK.gov's nuclear strategy is 'slow, inefficient, and costly' An independent taskforce commissioned by the UK government has warned of the nation's "unnecessarily slow, inefficient, and costly" approach to nuclear power (and weaponry). It has called for someone to hit the big red button - not for a launch, but for a radical "once-in-a-generation reset" to the regulations it claims are …
UK planning has become an industry bigger than the actual work it precedes.
This 2.5min vid is eye-opening.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3Plxrsryxw
TLDW?
Lower Thames Crossing tunnel planning to date has cost more than it cost Norway to actually build a much longer tunnel.
Bat tunnel for HS2
Hinkley power plant has been in discussions for 8 years with regulator on how to prevent fish swimming into exhaust pipes of Hinkley.
Planning application for the 3.3 miles Portishead to Bristol rail line re-opening is 80,000 pages long.
Behave yourself, seriously.
The whole reason HS2's budget ballooned like it did was all the subcontractors adding 10/20% on to the price knowing it's Government work and it'd be paid. Subsequently then sub contracting that work out to others who did the same 10/20%.
That's how the building game works, especially with infrastructure.
Here’s what happened. IR35 was applied in a way that made it commercially impossible for worker-owned businesses to continue to take part in HS2. If the person delivering the work owned part of the company, the client had to put the company’s revenue through PAYE, taxing it at substantially higher rates than other businesses delivering the same services. On top of that, the government attached IR35-related fines and liabilities to the hirers, pushing public bodies to route everything through big consultancies and labour intermediaries - with no consideration for what that would do to projects, small businesses, or the supply chain.
Those intermediaries then rehired the same specialists (forced out of the market), added their own mark-ups, and billed HS2 more for identical output. Every extra layer slowed decisions, inflated costs, and pushed delivery further off track.
That’s how IR35 helped cause the overruns - by dismantling a competitive supply chain and replacing it with the most expensive, least efficient delivery route possible.
@wolfetone here is not wrong.
Much of the HS2 contract base was/is T&M... and given a lot of the actual design work was not finished before contracts were let, the costs were a "suck thumb and come up with a ballpark figure" estimate plus padding for profit/unforeseen costs. And yes, as designs firmed up, costs went up, a lot of it due to proper requirements being (re)defined, more faffing around by governments and planning committees (yes, the HS2 bill did *not* provide planning consent, but rather left that open to local authorities) and their requirements, eventual environmental concerns (bat tunnel being one), and then changing designs and requirements by government (like cancelling/pausing bits) that all required reworking. Then add to that general inflation, building material cost inflation (which is higher than the RPI/CPI), loss of expertise and having to import that (costing yet more money)...
On T&M, *any* rework costs money, as any fool no. The report that was recently released on HS2 properly reamed the government (well, DfT and Treasury) and the HS2 company for chopping and changing and not getting a grip on costs. And apparently, half the work that should be done *still* does not have proper designs and requirements yet. So yeah, costs are going up!!
There is a very good set of podcasts on HS2:
The breadth of mistakes made and their cumulative effect, suggests there is scope for much deeper dives into each area of “cock-up” identified in this series. Fundamentally, the rush to get started and avoid early public engagement is what killed the project as it prevented an early sense and viability check.
Re: Bat tunnel
Whilst this has grabbed the headlines, given the cost of a simple footbridge, the cost of the bat tunnel isn’t totally out of proportion…
Cute, but it ignores how IR35 has actually reshaped complex supply chains.
Pre-IR35, specialist SMEs and worker-owned consultancies could slot directly into big infrastructure projects, often at lower cost, with lean overheads and deep niche expertise. They’d contract directly, keep profits in the business, and invest in capability.
Post-IR35, the manufactured risk and admin burden were deliberately shifted onto engagers, who now avoid contracting with small operators entirely. Instead, work flows almost exclusively through a handful of giant outsourcers and ‘consultancies’ whose entire model is to hoover up contracts and sub-sub-contract the actual work - each layer adding its 10 - 50% margin, exactly the waste we are complaining about.
So yes, you might laugh at the idea of a lone guy with a cement mixer bidding for Sizewell B - but the policy change didn’t just keep him out, it kept hundreds of small, highly competent specialist firms out. What we got instead is a fattened cartel of intermediaries who extract rent while the real work trickles down to the same people who used to be able to contract directly - only now on worse rates, through three middlemen, with taxpayers footing the bill for every markup.
Or point them to Torness, who already deal with this problem, and ask them how they deal with it. Then check if it's applicable to Hinkley's situation, and if it is applicable they should plan to do that.
When talking to the regulator, you can then point to the existing safe operation of a plant that they regulate and go "we're doing what you already approved".
If that's 8 years of work something has gone terribly wrong. 8 man-years maybe, if it's worked on by a team. But for it to take 8 calendar years suggests someone is really dragging their feet.
Although HS2 isn't finished and has cost more than building a life-size replica of the whole of Norway, the UK is a beacon of consistency in a troubled world.
All of its strategies are 'slow, inefficient, and costly'. Every. Single. One.
Other nations should bow down at world beating consistency like that.
Johnny Foreigner can't touch stuff like this:
400-Metre Path To Cost Council Almost £10m..
https://www.bristol247.com/news-and-features/news/400-metre-path-cost-council-almost-10m/
If you could say that Nuclear power was inherently safe, then one could make a case for deregulation.
The problem is that tight regulation is needed for construction, operation, disposal of waste materials and, ultimately, for decommissioning.
I was involved in the decommissioning of Drigg (I stand to be corrected, it was a long time ago) and decommissioning a nuclear power station is not an inexpensive undertaking.
"disposal of waste materials"
For radioactive materials like uranium and transuranics just melt them with boron and silica and make glass (just like old uranium glass), then dump them at the bottom of the ocean.
For contaminated materials just incinerate them, capture the exhaust smoke, let it settle into dust, then mix that with boron and silica and make glass and dump it at the bottom of the ocean.
For contaminated metals these are already recycled and de-contaminated.
It's all so expensive because all the sensible options are banned,
To build nuclear reactors you need well-educated welders, CNC machinists, engineers, nuclear medicuses, large steel foundries, well-educated electricians, capable civil servants who perform the funding and so on.
A lot of that has been allowed to atrophy in western Europe, due to Maoist-GREEN propaganda. Meanwhile COMINTERN nations have the greatest industrial muscle by now. Great for COMINTERN. COMINTERN now operates one of the largest nuclear and coal power station fleets and they build them in large numbers. Russia leads in Fast Neutron Reactors.
In Germany we had - objectively speaking - some of the most advanced, most economic and most reliable nuclear reactors. Called Konvoi. Shut down by the Maoists and the weaklings who did not fight them.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraftwerk_Neckarwestheim
What we need are folks like Franz Josef Strauß and Charles DeGaulle to turn the ship around.
Kick out the Uniparty and elect Patriots !
Odd.
We make parts for the military, aviation, race car teams and most of the world hyper / super cars. We have close on 50 CNC machines along with all the CMM, X-ray, CT scanners etc required.
One of our contracts involves machining parts that both ourselves and the Chinese make. Our parts run at about a 10% scrap rate (this is not unusual due to the specification required). The Chinese? 80%.
It's tolerated by the customer because the parts are so cheap.
The dumb thing is, we make more money off the Chinese part of the contract, because machining the parts is where the money is. We get paid per part even if there was a 100% failure rate.
One of our contracts involves machining parts that both ourselves and the Chinese make. Our parts run at about a 10% scrap rate (this is not unusual due to the specification required). The Chinese? 80%.It's tolerated by the customer because the parts are so cheap.
Not by me when I was a customer! So yep, Chinese parts might have been cheaper. But then having to test all those parts to find the 80% that weren't to spec got to be a PITA and added a lot of cost. So we switched to a local supplier instead. Still needed to test the parts, but lower rejection rates and a shorter supply chain meant shipping product faster and not having to wait for replacements from China.
Oh thanks dude... just what I need on a shite tuesday, someone deriding my job and work (and the stuff we make).
We deliver aerospace parts (along with medical bits) and a shedload of widgets (my area) per week. and its fun reading the orders where the customers specify 'no chinese sourced materials' in the order. almost as if they've ordered chinese before and not got exactly what they ordered. 50% scrap rate? well if you like 50% of your aircraft to bounce up and down the runway before arriving at the terminal as a huge great ball of fire , chinese it is.
But they do have a talent for delivering at a price point way below what we can supply in the widget stuff if you like the 3-4 month delivery on them, which is why our customers keep us on board, because they can order and we'll have it on their loading dock before the end of the week (we've even managed the following morning on some orders). ok it costs more, but its the law of sub-contracts, you can have 2 of the following: price, quality, delivery. so if you want it cheap and good it aint gonna be quick, or if you want quality and you want it now, it aint gonna be cheap.
But the hardest part of the job is finding people who want to do it, because it takes a lot(and I mean a lot) of knowledge to be able to make stuff to high quality as fast as we can, I'd say 8-10 years to train someone. and they earn at that point about as much as a newly qualified teacher. which takes 5 yrs
Britain should be teaming up with Macron and France to rebuild the nuclear construction industry. He seems to do the right things.
Germany still needs to drink more Maoist p1ss until she comes to reason, so do not count on us yet.
After that, a Nuclear Airbus could be envisioned.
We already have. The EPR reactor is a French design by EDF (extensively tweaked by the UK regulator adding many years to the process and a lot of extra cost) and the main forged components are coming from Framatome (not to be confused with Frantone) in France.
The major hurdle is still the UK planning process.
Britain should be teaming up with Macron and France to rebuild the nuclear construction industry. He seems to do the right things.
Macron & Starmer teaming up would be like Laurel and Hardy. But that 'special relationship' and possibly one G.Brown Esq's decision to bail out EDF is one of the reasons why we're in this mess. Other reactors are available, eg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APR-1400
Which the Czechs are planning to build instead of the EPR. UK did contemplate those, but NuGen kinda fell apart. Other countries do seem able to build NPPs for much less than the UK though.
Absolutely. And it's notable that groups like Just Stop [western] Oil started attempting to blockade western refineries at the same time that Russia stopped providing gas and fuel with the fairly obvious intent of shoving prices yet higher by further depressing supply.
The same as the green groups are frantically protesting against running power lines from the offshore wind turbines to the rest of the country so that all of the wind turbines can be connected to something which can actually use the power and so displace gas generation.
The next major thing with nuclear is going to be producing the Rolls Royce SMR's (which at 580MW really stretch the definition of "small") on a factory line.
When RR starts knocking them out at a rate of a few a year then they need the planning permission process sorted to deploy them, or else the production in the factory is worthless.
Hence sorting out the planning system now so that they can deploy them with some relation to the time taken to roll them off of the factory lines.
The real objective of SMRs is the "modular", the "small" is simply seen as the way to get there. The largest SMR which can still use modular construction techniques will probably have the lowest operating costs per MW/hr. SMRs are more or less attempting to bring to nuclear power construction what modular shipbuilding did to modern shipyards.
I suspect that if the new RR reactors prove successful then they will find ways of increasing the size while still remaining modular in design as there are large economies of scale in electric power production.
El Reg said: No mention was made at the time of the need to feed the increasing power demands of large language models and other AI services.
The UK plans on switching to electric cars and electric heat and so sources of electricity which can deliver energy for those 24/7/365 will be needed. If your electric car needs recharging or your home needs heating, no amount of smart meters will take up the slack as you still need to go to work in the morning and you still need to heat your home whether the wind is blowing or not. The only sources of energy that can supply that reliability without burning fossil fuels are nuclear and hydroelectric, and the UK is a bit short on high mountains to get more than minor amounts of electricity from hydroelectric. So that leaves nuclear.
Current plans are for modern UK civilization to run entirely on electricity. Without a reliable source of electric power the UK won't even have a stone age civilization.
Currently wind and solar rely on a partnership with gas to provide the reliability that they lack. However, gas is being phased out everywhere else. Without large scale use of gas across Britain, there will no longer be a gas industry in Britain. Without a gas industry, where does the gas come from which wind and solar need?
Batteries are not a substitute for gas turbine generators, as real world installations are rated to deliver for hours, not days or weeks. Batteries will make a great way of dealing with daily peaks (e.g. everyone comes home and puts the electric kettle on) provided they are paired with a primary source of energy that can be relied upon to recharge them every night, such as say nuclear.
If the goal is to provide energy with zero carbon output, then no one has offered a viable alternative to nuclear power that would work in the UK.
The problem the UK has is not one of technology. The problem is the planning process for any large project in the UK is slow, inefficient, expensive, and produces very little of value. If Canada (which has its own bureaucracy problems) for example can plan, approve, build, and bring into service an SMR in the same time frame as the UK takes to just plan and approve, there is clearly room for improvement in the UK.
This. I keep saying it... China says "we're building it" and they get on with it. The population has not much say. That of course sucks. France uses a similar approach of "we're building it", but they do try to engage the population by pointing out the economic benefits of the thing they're building.
The UK and Germany give their local population *way* too much power when it comes to economically important infrastructure projects... Locals can waste extraordinary amounts of time and money by demanding judicial reviews, and appeals, and voting down planning permission... and... and...
Same happened on HS2, ironically, especially through the Chilterns. I'm still pissed off at our county council for wasting tens of thousands of pounds better spent elsewhere objecting to HS2.
It used to be the same in the UK, its how they built the railways in the first place!
There are some legitimate changes that have been made to railway design that are better. Long tunnels can't just have giant vertical shafts for natural ventilation and now need escape routes, emergency stairs etc so that if there is a fire people can get out more easily. Although I'm not sure there has been a major rail tunnel incident in decades.
https://learninglegacy.hs2.org.uk/document/design-of-chiltern-tunnel-and-ventilation-shaft-interfaces/
And of course the locals didn't want to see anything so they had to design barns and sheds to hide all this.
Now if you compare it to how ventilation shafts used to be built
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-MdPviQcu0
Big 'ole, made wi' bricks!
And their only proposed solution is "To build on the thematic issues thus far identified, and to begin compiling discrete
recommendations for government action, the Taskforce shall host a series of engagement
sessions."
So more dither and babble, with no concrete plan. All they did was dig up the same dead body (over-regulation) that has been exhumed and reburied so many times there is nothing left to autopsy.
""We need new nuclear to deliver a golden age of clean energy abundance," energy secretary Ed Milliband said at the time of the investment's announcement, "because that is the only way to protect family finances, take back control of our energy, and tackle the climate crisis."
The idea that nuclear will solve all of our problems, has to be challenged. Nuclear does not address the now out of control heat input to the planet from the ongoing use of heat engines to create energy, particularly electricity. Net zero argues that the overall problem is that the heat entering our atmosphere during daylight hours is retained by carbon dioxide CO2 gas at 400+ ppm, so the first thing to describe is something that has long been well known in the glasshouse industry, that increasing the CO2 input to the plant growth area inside the glasshouse both increases the quantity of plant product, and in doing so, dramatically reduces the level of CO2 within the glasshouse. The growing plants adsorb the CO2; for example you can find detailed research that shows during daylight, the adsorption in fact reduces CO2 by half. That the early morning level of 400 ppm reduces to ~200 ppm during daylight hours, and it is not until the sun sets, (and the greenhouse temperature reduces back to night time temperatures), that the CO2 levels retain their 400 ppm level. Just this simple example clearly demonstrates what is a fatal (for the planet), flaw in the concept of net zero; that there is insufficient CO2 within the planet atmosphere during daylight to retain the heat of the day.
Then we need to turn to another aspect of this debate, the sun only shines upon the area of the planet during daylight; so for two thirds of the rotation of the planet the heat reduces as the CO2 increases.
When we look at an century old technology of the power station, of creating heat, with coal, oil, gas, nuclear or even fusion, we observe water being boiled to produce very high pressure steam which drives the turbine to drive the electricity generator; which creates waste steam at a lower pressure and temperature which has to be condensed back to water to be returned to the boiler to create more steam. That is a "Heat Engine", no different to the same technology driving all fossil fuel burning vehicles. We know a lot about the development of heat engines, where for example the heat efficiency of a well managed coal fired power station, is much better than a nuclear powered power station, where the latter has to add the need to keep cool the nuclear pile; but it is generally accepted that ALL such power stations have to remove more than 60% of the heat generated as waste heat, either into the atmosphere, or by pumping water from the surrounding sea to cool the waste steam back to water. For example the new nuclear power plants being built at Hinkley Point in Somerset in the UK need a huge diameter tunnel, 2.8 miles long to deliver 120,000 litres per second of warm water, ~12 Degrees warmer than the input temperature, back out into the surrounding sea. For every 1GW of electricity generated, ~ 2.8 GW of heat is delivered back into the sea. Very importantly, not during daylight hours, but continually 24 hours of each day for the next 60 years.
Now understand that these power station heat engines are the cause of rapidly growing air and sea temperatures; particularly sea temperatures which are driving the rapid increase in dramatic episodes of severe rainfall; rain that stems from the higher sea temperatures creating equally rapid increases in evaporation of the sea surface which drive the increase in rainfall.
So going nuclear is not going to do anything about the heat generated by power stations. that our problem is the strange belief of those suggesting the solution is the reduction of CO2, when there is no debate about the heat source, and about the simple well known fact that during daylight, CO2 decreases due to adsorption by plant life.
All of us are facing the need to stop the use of ANY form of heat engine to create an energy source; or completely lose control of the climate of the planet.
Please think about that when next time there is a report about a massive rain storm destructively washing through a town or city; or again when the air temperature reaches the point where we humans cannot survive, and forest fires burn all surrounding surface plant growth.
We have no option; we must stop the use of heat engines. Period!
Err well OK, I have tried, I promise you I have tried to understand your points to little avail.
You seem to be arguing against the Second Law of Thermodynamics (stop the use of heat engines)? In which case tough, that’s a known, well understood and accepted physical truth.
Or maybe I have misunderstood what you mean?
Oh no, hang on, I’ve re-read it a third time and I think I get it, you don’t understand what a ‘heat engine is’ do you? And that’s fine, it's a sort of abstract concept. Basically you have two ‘bodies’ at different temperature and heat will flow form the hotter to the cooler and you can extract useful energy from this flow. The higher the difference in the temperatures between the two bodies, the more useful work can be obtained. That's the classic description of a ‘heat engine’!
In some respects you are a ‘heat engine’, how do you think your metabolic processes are maintained?
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