Eight months ago, the UK government made a big bet on nuclear, promising to treble the size of the country’s nuclear fleet between now and 2050.
Delivering on that promise would require huge investment in both large-scale new nuclear plants and small-scale modular reactors. This follows years of government delay and prevarication.
Ministers at the time told the public this push for nuclear was essential to achieve the UK’s aim to have net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
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That nuclear-fuelled zero-carbon future could now be in doubt, according to news reports. A government official told the BBC that plans for the nuclear power plant Sizewell C, which would supply around 7 per cent of the UK’s electricity, are “under review” as the government looks to cut spending.
The prime minister’s spokesperson , saying that negotiations with private firms over funding were ongoing and the government “hoped to get a deal over the line as soon as possible”.
However, some academics are questioning whether new nuclear is even necessary.
For years it has been energy orthodoxy to argue that nuclear will be an essential component of the UK’s energy mix to meet its net zero goal. Wind and solar would supply most of the country’s energy, so the thinking went, but some back-up power would be needed for when the wind doesn’t blow and the sky is cloudy.
It is an argument broadly accepted by , the that advises it and, reluctantly, many environmental campaigners.
But that is now changing, says at University College London, author of that suggests the government’s backing for new nuclear is “increasingly difficult to justify”.
Renewables get competitive
Price and his colleagues used a model to design cost-effective net-zero energy systems for 2050, using any mix of technologies, such as nuclear fission, interconnectors with other countries, bioenergy with carbon capture, hydrogen storage, lithium batteries, wind and solar power.
The team ran the model 32 times with different variables, such as weather, level of power supplies coming from Europe and the price of new nuclear power.
“Only in two cases did the model build any new nuclear power, beyond what we expect to still be running in 2050,” says Price. Even then, it was on the assumption that nuclear could be delivered relatively quickly and cheaply.
Renewables and storage technologies, such as wind, solar and batteries, are becoming so competitive on price that they are crowding out new nuclear from the system, he says. This is upending traditional thinking about energy grid design. “Because renewables have got so cheap over the last decade people are struggling to catch up with that,” he says.
For campaigners long opposed to new nuclear on the grounds it is a dangerous and polluting source of energy, Price’s analysis is to be cheered. The argument for new nuclear is “getting increasingly hard to sustain, as the technologies or the enablers of a fully renewable system are becoming clearer and clearer”, says Greenpeace UK’s chief scientist Doug Parr.
It takes eight to 10 years to build a new nuclear power station. If models are saying a renewables-plus-storage system is feasible now, at current prices, they could well be by far the best choice in a decade’s time, he says.
at Bangor University, UK, disagrees with the conclusion of Price’s study. “There’s just no reasonable future electricity supply which is net zero that doesn’t include nuclear,” he says. “Nuclear is just very boring, and it will just work.”
What about nuclear fusion? Is there any point starting the lengthy process of building new fission plants if five years later nuclear fusion seems a possibility? Absolutely, says at the University of Sheffield, UK. Nuclear fusion will be great if it works, but it is at least two decades away from becoming operational. “We can’t be neglecting fission,” she says.
There is one point all the scientists I spoke to agree on. If the UK government ditches plans to build Sizewell C, it needs to have an alternative route to net zero. Without more large-scale new nuclear coming online, energy efficiency, renewables and storage will need extra backing. “It’s got to be about a government having a proper plan,” says Parr.
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