I’ve reluctantly come to the conclusion that the only way the nuclear industry’s hype-machine is going to be stopped in its tracks is a Russian cyber-attack on the nine nuclear reactors still operating here in the UK, causing them all to close down and leading to the grid temporarily collapsing. That should do it.
I jest – sort of. But nothing else has worked. In just the last few weeks:
- The Treasury’s financial modelling for the new power station at Sizewell C (seen by the Financial Times) gives a range of roughly £80 billion to £100 billion, far higher than the official estimate of £47 billion from the Department of Net Zero and Energy Security – which in itself was already nearly double the original cost of £20 billion!
- The Treasury recently described the Government’s proposals for a new Geological Disposal Facility to deal with the 700,000 cubic metres of spent nuclear fuel as ‘unachievable’. This is a truly extraordinary development – confirming that the UK still has NO idea what to do about its legacy nuclear waste, let alone the waste that will be produced by any new reactors. Yet this got hardly a mention in the media.
- The Government confirmed that it will be splurging a further £17 billion of taxpayers’ money between now and 2030 on Sizewell C, Small Modular Reactors and fusion energy – even as it continues to ignore the scourge of chronic poverty here in the UK, with 4.5 million children living in poverty – the highest number ever recorded.
On top of which, the industry’s hype-machine is now being turbocharged by the even more powerful hype-machine of AI. Never forget that the nuclear industry is supremely well-equipped to leap onto any and every boondoggle coming down the track – the Bitcoin/Crypto boom a decade ago (which never quite happened), and then green hydrogen. With every hard-to-abate sector queueing up for its share of vanishingly small volumes of green hydrogen, the Knights of Nuclear were up into their saddles just as fast as enough hobby horses could be corralled together to claim that it is only nuclear power that can provide the electricity required.
And now it’s AI. We’ve all read the growth projections for AI-enabled markets – from billions of dollars today to trillions tomorrow. I won’t weary you with the extrapolated increases in electricity consumption for all the new data centres that this entails – but it’s going to be a lot. On a par with the electricity consumption of small countries. New data centres are being built right now, ever bigger, already gobbling up more and more electricity. Nor will I invite you to ask why this AI boom must not – ever, on any terms – be subjected to much deeper scrutiny as to the balance of costs and benefits that will emerge. AI represents the apogee of latter-day technological determinism: if it can be done, then it must and will be done. So suck it up.
I’m not making light of this. The AI-driven nuclear boom in the USA is for real. Donald Trump is getting rid of most regulatory oversight of the nuclear industry, to speed things up, and stock prices of all the publicly traded nuclear companies are up by huge percentages. And it doesn’t seem to matter what kind of nuclear we’re talking about: 40-year-old decommissioned reactors to be given a new lease of life; plans for new big reactors, even in blue states like New York, being fast-tracked; Big Tech applying for construction permits for Small Modular Reactors that are still on the drawing board; and more than $500 billion apparently raised for new fusion reactors – seriously!
It’s not (yet) quite so insane here in the UK, but the signals are worrying. Strenuous efforts are being made by Ministers to force the Office for Nuclear Regulation to fast track any old nuclear proposal. Sweetheart deals with the private sector are being sorted out – regardless of the costs to taxpayers. Rational, evidence-based decision-making is a long-gone memory.
What exactly lies behind this mania? In the timeless words of Sherlock Holmes: ”once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth”.
So, let’s try that out for size in the context of nuclear power. It would surely be completely impossible for any responsible government pursuing a Net Zero energy strategy to prioritise nuclear power over all other options, given that:
- Large-scale nuclear reactors are now by far the most expensive option (on a Levelised Cost of Energy basis). UK Government figures in July this year showed new nuclear at £109 per MWh, offshore wind at £44MWh, large-scale solar at £41MWh and onshore wind at £38MWh.
- Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) don’t yet exist, but all experts agree their electricity will be even more expensive than that of large reactors – precisely because they can’t achieve the same economies of scale.
- The contribution of both big and small new reactors to a Net Zero electricity system in the UK will be literally ZERO before 2035 at the very earliest.
- Both big and small reactors will continue to produce significant levels of nuclear waste, adding to a waste crisis to which (as already mentioned) we have no long-term solution.
- ALL nuclear facilities pose a significant security risk, both from the point of view of cybersecurity (more later) and the very real possibility of physical attacks through ‘hostile third parties’.
Which brings us to the extraordinarily improbable truth of it: these days, nuclear power has little to do with electricity generation, and a whole lot more to do with the maintenance of the UK’s nuclear weapons capability.
If I’d offered you that (admittedly controversial) view five years ago, I suspect most readers would have dismissed it out of hand – after decades of being reassured by governments that there was a world of difference between nuclear weapons and nuclear power. “Atoms for Peace”, as US President Eisenhower so deceitfully put it way back in 1953. Denials since then as to the links were constant, forceful and a critical part of the propaganda for nuclear power – on the persuasive grounds that ‘support for nuclear power will never get stronger until the technologies are separated in people’s minds’, as argued by M.V.Ramana in his excellent book “Nuclear is Not the Solution.” In other words, to sell it in, you’ve got to separate them out.
Well, that’s all gone now. In a staggeringly cynical volte-face, governments with nuclear weapons are now falling over themselves to demonstrate just how much their citizens benefit from the closest possible linkage between nuclear power and their nuclear weapons capability. President Macron was the first to spell it out: ” without civilian nuclear energy there is no military use of this technology, and without military use, there is no civilian nuclear energy”.
It took a while for the UK Government to catch up, but in its latest Nuclear Roadmap it no longer beats around the bush. There are multiple references to the synergies between nuclear power and nuclear weapons: “this Government will proactively look for opportunities to align delivery of the civil and nuclear defence enterprises….it acknowledges the crucial importance of the nuclear industry to our national security, both in terms of energy supply and the defence nuclear enterprise”, and so on.
Big corporations are loving the fact that this is now out in the open. Bechtel, Babcock and Wilcox, AECOM, Rolls Royce – they’ve all spent decades feeding at the trough of either overt or hidden cross-subsidies between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Rolls-Royce has been one of the most outspoken advocates for Small Modular Reactors, arguing their importance back in 2017 “to relieve the Ministry of Defence of the burden of retaining the skills and capability”.
We do indeed live in different times.
Not least because most people are feeling a lot less secure about the world in which we now live. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has seriously spooked NATO governments, and defence budgets are ramping up year on year. China’s military ambitions become clearer by the month, and its aggressive positioning in the South China Sea is seen by security experts as a sign of things to come. No wonder the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists have re-set the Doomsday Clock at 89 seconds before midnight.
Even though the vast majority of people will be completely unaware of any official policy changes, most undoubtedly feeling less apprehensive about these nuclear synergies. Nuclear disarmament comes a long way down their priority lists. Which means we can expect governments to get even more brazen about these nuclear co-dependencies, whether that’s a question of technology overlaps (with the defence establishment acknowledging, for instance, that building and operating nuclear-propelled submarines would be insanely expensive without hidden cross-subsidies from the nuclear power industry), or the increasingly explicit ‘revolving doors’ as senior personnel hop back and forth between military and civilian roles.
As anti-nuclear critics point out, however, there is a striking and potentially lethal irony here. As nuclear nations double down on nuclear power, it’s blindingly obvious that they are ramping up serious threats to national security. Nowhere is this clearer than with the drive to develop SMRs. Most designs currently on the drawing board (that are not light water reactors) will be using as their fuel high-assay, low-enriched uranium – or HALEU, to use the jargon. When it’s first extracted from the earth, uranium concentrations are usually around 1% of the total volume of the ore. HALEU fuel has to be enriched up to around 19% – just below the 20% threshold for the kind of highly-enriched uranium judged to be viable for the manufacture of nuclear bombs. And almost all HALEU fuel comes from Russia!
Beyond that, every nuclear facility (old and new) becomes a target for hostile third parties. Welcome back to the inconceivably scary world of nuclear cyberwarfare. Despite the highest grade of propaganda promoted by the Ministry of Defence – that all nuclear facilities are ‘bomb-proof’ (I kid you not!) – most cyber-experts grudgingly acknowledge that this is just bullshit when it comes to cyber-defence.
And we have no finer example of that than Sellafield, one of the most hazardous nuclear waste and decommissioning sites in the world, sprawling across 2 square miles on the Cumbrian coast. Back in December 2023, a Guardian exclusive revealed that Sellafield had been hacked into ‘by cyber groups closely linked to Russia and China’ since 2015 – despite years of cover-ups by senior staff. “The full extent of any data loss and any continuing risks to systems was made harder to quantify by Sellafield’s failure to alert nuclear regulators for several years”. The denials didn’t last long. The Guardian’s painstaking research over 18 months had got Sellafield bang to rights. In October 2024, it was fined £400,000 by the Office For Nuclear Regulation after it pleaded guilty to criminal charges over years of cyber-security breaches. Astonishingly, the ONR also found that 75% of its computer servers were vulnerable to cyber-attack.
At which point, it’s worth remembering that Sellafield houses the largest store of plutonium on the planet. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and its occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear reactor (the largest in Europe) tells us all we need to know about the possibility of physical risks when every nuclear facility becomes a target for any hostile third-party. Why use your own nuclear weapons (with all the risks of escalation that this entails) when you can just take out your enemy’s nuclear power stations or nuclear waste facilities?
What a tangled nuclear web our governments weave in pursuit of their lethally improbable objectives! Nearly 30 years ago, Sir Michael Atiyah, then President of the UK’s Royal Society, said this: ”I believe history will show that insistence on a UK nuclear capability (both weapons and energy) was fundamentally misguided, a total waste of resources, and a significant factor in our relative economic decline over the past 50 years”.
