Nuclear power is the future Britain rejected. Now it's time for us to think again

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Britain was once poised to be the world leader in clean energy. We split the atom, pioneered the first commercial nuclear power station, and by 1988 had built 18 reactors, the third highest number in the world. By the mid-1990s, we were producing enough energy to supply a quarter of the country's electricity. But then, even as climate change was mov ing from being a contested idea to an accepted one, progress stalled. We stopped building entirely. Now we get just 14% of electricity from this source, and five of our six remaining plants are due for retirement at the end of the decade.
Last week Ed Miliband optimistically announced the dawn of a new 'golden age' of nuclear power. His hopes rest on a single Suffolk megaplant, Sizewell C – already delayed and now to be around 12 years in the making, if finished on time. And that looks far from guaranteed.
After 10 years of planning, and nine of building, Hinkley Point C, in Somerset, pictured above, missed its deadline for completion this year. It has now been pushed back to 2031, with such an expanded budget that it is to be the most costly power plant in history. How did we lose our advantage? Of all the possible ways to gather clean energy, nuclear power seems the most likely to allow us to dispense with fossil fuels completely. Wind and solar power can be unreliable – especially on a cloudy island with such variable weather – and backup systems can't always compensate, as hydroelectricity stores and batteries run down in a few hours. In fact, wind farms must actually shut down when gusts are too strong. Meanwhile, a single nuclear power station creates enough energy to provide power for 2 million average Europeans. Over time, it is also the lowest-price way to garner low-carbon energy, and it has the lightest ecological burden.
Steep initial costs are talked about as the central challenge to building more power stations – and that is the block against which political will has tended to founder. Long and risky construction processes mean that the price starts high and can rise astronomically if things go wrong. But British projects are also among the most expensive in the world. Only America does worse.
The UK has more stringent safety rules than many other countries – and in some, such as China, construction workers earn less than their British counterparts. High-paying Finland and France build more cheaply, as does South Korea, where costs are roughly a quarter of what they are in Britain.
Instead Britain may be missing the secret to success, which – according to the thinktank Britain Remade – is repetition. South Korea builds fleets of plants for every design, relying on economies of scale and learning from practice. This provides workers with standard protocol and a steady pipeline of projects. France bulked up its supply in the 1970s with a similar approach, building 56 reactors with an average construction time of six years each. But Britain seems to have forgotten how to build nuclear power stations. Each project must start again from scratch. That is the direct result of a full 20-year hiatus.
Britain's underlying problem with nuclear has not in fact been technical, but psychological. The trigger was two high-profile disasters, both of which sharply halted nuclear progress all around the world: Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011. The first was the result of a human mistake – operators disabled safety systems during a test – combined with a flawed reactor design; the second was caused by an earthquake and tsunami. The horrific results were splashed across newspapers, and reporting continued for years. But in some countries the effect has lingered longer than in others.
People fear nuclear for much the same reason they worry about shark attacks
In the UK, according to a recent study, public fears were further stoked after Chernobyl by an unusual alliance of environmental activists and fossil-fuel interest groups. The Thatcher government was in the midst of a fight with the miners' unions when Chernobyl melted down. The disaster became part of that battle. Analysis shows that MPs sponsored by miners' unions were much more likely to speak out against nuclear energy; newspapers with ties to fossil fuel published more anti-nuclear articles.
Britain's sluggishness can also be explained partly by the political makeup of its green groups, which might have formed the vanguard of those pushing for this clean energy solution. But an ideological split emerged, dominated by those who preferred to campaign for reduced energy consumption rather than technological solutions. Environmentalists had turned against nuclear power in the early 1960s – psychologists have tracked its association among these groups with the nuclear bomb. With few green champions for nuclear, Britain turned back to fossil fuels.
As a result, there has been an enduring idea in Britain that nuclear is 'very unsafe' – similar to Germany, which has all but shut down its nuclear capacity since Fukushima. This compares with 15% of Danish and 11% of Swedes.
But this does not reflect reality. Hugely improved safety methods mean the likelihood of another disaster is extremely minimal. Calculations of deaths per terawatt-hour generated put nuclear power, at 0.03, on a par with wind turbines, which is at 0.04, (mostly from accidents, such as drowning in the process of setting them up). For coal, this rises to 24.6, owing to pollution. In fact living near a coal power station exposes people to more radiation than living near a nuclear one – but both are low, at around 0.01mSv (millisieverts, a measurement of radiation) a year. For comparison, those living in Cornwall receive about 6.9mSv a year
Risks are tough to calculate correctly. We tend to overestimate the danger of the dramatic and unfamiliar. People fear nuclear power over coal power for much the same reason they worry more about shark attacks than traffic accidents. But fossil fuels are much more dangerous, by any standard. One back-of-the-envelope calculation from a recent report finds that the swap in nuclear power stations for fossil fuels after Chernobyl has resulted in the loss of '318 million life years' since 1986.
Yet support for nuclear power is rising across the world, including in Britain. Why? Well, perhaps the most efficient way to shift perception of one threat is for another, larger one to come along . France's success can be explained by the oil crisis in 1973: the country was almost completely reliant on foreign oil; that problem ate the nuclear one. Now we are going through a similar moment of our own. Academics have used the term 'reluctant acceptance' to explain the shift in support as climate risks ramp up. But the real change may have come since the energy threats posted by the war in Ukraine. Campaigners should remember that their greatest advances are made not in the field of science, but in politics.
Photograph by Adrian Dennis/AFP