Meanwhile, in a parallel universe, the legions of nuclear fat cats residing here in the UK are smiling very broadly indeed. It would appear that both Rachel Reeves and Ed Miliband have nothing better to do with our money, as taxpayers, than to go on filling up their subsidy saucers more or less on demand.
Taxpayers really don’t know very much about how DESNZ spends our money. More problematically, not a lot of the UK’s more or less mis-informed energy correspondents are particularly interested in helping taxpayers to understand what’s really going on – for the most part because they’re ‘ideologically captured’, with very little interest in the truth.
A bit harsh? Well, why is it, for instance, that not one of them provides any serious analysis of DESNZ’s annual expenditure? Not least as the details of this (on p.18 of its 2024-2025 Annual Report & Accounts) are completely mind-blowing. To summarise:
DESNZ TOTAL DEPARTMENTAL SPEND
Total departmental spend: £8.6 billion
Total spend on nuclear power: £5.1 billion (60%)
Total spend on everything else: £3.5 billion (40%)
See what I mean? Literally mind-blowing! A few more details on the nuclear side of things:
- Nuclear Decommissioning Agency : £3 billion (dealing with the legacy of past nuclear programmes).
- Support for Sizewell C power station: £1.67 billion.
- UK Atomic Energy Agency (UKAEA): £400 million (doing bonkers stuff like nuclear fusion).
- Managing our ‘Energy Legacy’: £85 million (roughly half the total figure).
- Great British Nuclear: £26 million (the more or less useless quango overseeing this fiasco).
That’s the size of the nuclear sink hole: roughly £5.1 billion! Leaving roughly £3.5 billion for everything else, including all direct support for renewables, ‘delivering affordable energy’, science, research and ‘capability’, as well as other arm’s length bodies. Moreover, even that low figure is not quite what it seems: roughly £450 million is set aside for another of Ed Miliband’s sink holes, namely Carbon Capture and Storage.
Do you need any more persuading that this is obviously a completely mis-titled Department: instead of DESNZ, it really should be called DNPB&B – the Department of Nuclear Power and Bits & Bobs.
Where the hell are you, Rachel Reeves? For those sick of your hangdog ‘black hole blathering‘, it would be wonderful to think you might instruct just a few of your civil servants to instruct the ever-well-meaning Ed Miliband to undertake an exercise in zero budgeting for FY 25/26. Great British Nuclear could go at a stroke of a pen – no one would notice. The UKAEA’s budget could be halved, leaving it to focus on decommissioning redundant reactors and dealing with nuclear waste. Subsidies for Sizewell C could be massively reduced – although the Department did such a poor deal with various private sector investors that there will be significant compensation to be paid.
Sadly, of course, there is nothing that can be done about the £3 billion set aside, EVERY YEAR, for dealing with the legacy of earlier nuclear programmes – decommissioning, site security, managing nuclear waste and so on. Nuclear campaigners have struggled for years to explain that our ‘nuclear legacy’ is in fact our ‘current nuclear reality’, and that this is a figure which can only grow and grow over the years. The Public Accounts Committee looked recently at the cost of decommissioning many of the facilities at Sellafield, currently assessed at £396 million through to 2070, and couldn’t have made their incredulity any clearer. On top of that, we have the looming additional cost of building a long-term Geological Disposal Facility, for which taxpayers will be paying hundreds of billions of pounds through to the end of this century.
Ask the Treasury or officials at DNPN&B what they believe that total legacy figure will be in FY2030/2031,or FY2040/2041, and you can be absolutely guaranteed to get literally no answer at all.
And yet – AND YET – we go on pouring yet more billions into NEW waste-generating nuclear monstrosities like Hinkley C and now Sizewell C.
It’s nearly 50 years since the highly influential Flowers Report was published in 1976. Its single most important recommendation was as follows:
“There should be no commitment to a large programme of nuclear fission power until it has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that a method exists to ensure the safe containment of long-lived, highly radioactive waste for the indefinite future.”
We are, truly, led by nuclear donkeys.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, all this never-ending filling-up of the industry’s subsidy saucers has massive opportunity costs for what we should really be doing with precious taxpayers’ money.
As in:
- getting as enthusiastically as possible behind the potential for tidal power (see yesterday’s blog).
- getting as enthusiastically as possible behind retrofitting and the green economy (see tomorrow’s blog).
I’ll return to the whole question of just how many billions Rachel Reeves could divert from these nuclear sink holes as we get a little closer to the budget in November.
21 October 2025
