A gentler way

Category: Forecasting

  • A golden age of nuclear

    On the day before yesterday, 15 September 2025, the British government announced a new ‘golden age of nuclear’, featuring the biggest build-out of nuclear power in generations and a ‘landmark’ US-UK partnership. To those who have been in the industry a while, it feels like Groundhog Day.

    Fifty years ago, the then Secretary of State for Energy, Tony Benn, championed the British AGR programme of new nuclear power stations. While he might not have used the words “too cheap to meter” commonly attributed to him, he was certainly persuaded that building nuclear would bring down the price of electricity. It was a judgement that he regretted in later life.

    Lord Marshall, head of the Central Electricity Generating Board in the 1980s and a key influence on Margaret Thatcher, went through a similar transition to Benn. Marshall resigned in 1989 over the City’s refusal to include nuclear in the privatisation of the industry. It seemed to him that safety regulations had got out of hand, particularly in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster a few years earlier; and this was a primary reason why nuclear was commercially unviable.

    Will this new ‘golden age’ be more successful than the last one? The question certainly needs to be asked. A dispassionate assessment of recent evidence is not encouraging. The Hinkley Point C project is reportedly 12 years behind schedule (the latest estimate of its commissioning year is 2031) and 4 times over budget. There is an echo here of the Dungeness B AGR which began construction in 1965 but only starting producing electricity in 1983.

    The financial risk at Hinkley C is at least underpinned by its parent company, Electricite de France. The next European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) to be built on our shores, Sizewell C, was approved by the government in 2022. It carries no such guarantee: if it runs significantly over budget, the cost will be picked up by the British public, rather than by EDF.

    So it’s a little worrying that Sizewell C was recently described – as reported in the Financial Times at the end of August – as “terrifyingly complex” and “almost unbuildable” by a former head of EDF, Henri Proglio. His view is shared by many in the industry who feel that the company’s campaign to build the world’s safest nuclear station – in the aftermath of Chernobyl in 1986, the twin towers attack in 2001 and Fukushima in 2011 – has led to a doomed design, with its excess of independent cooling systems and containment shields of reinforced concrete several feet thick.

    Scarred by its experiences of the EPR in Finland and France, as well as the UK, EDF itself has moved on to a new and simpler design: EPR2. By common consent amongst both supporters and detractors of the project, Sizewell C is quite likely to be the last of its kind in the world. Opinion is divided as to whether Sizewell C will reap the benefits of replication and standardisation in the wake of Hinkley C, or whether the historical pattern of vast overrun will be repeated. The likelihood that the design will be near-obsolete, and that EDF’s attention will be largely elsewhere, doesn’t seem reassuring on the face of it.

    Only time will tell who is right. But whatever the truth about Sizewell C, we surely need a more grown-up debate than another historically-blind promise of a golden age. We need a fearless and open national discussion about the cost/risk trade-off: how much should society be willing to pay to lower the risk of a nuclear catastrophe from X in a million to Y in a million?

    It does not appear that we are going to get it.

  • A wise government

    A new PM. A new cabinet. Who are these people? The BBC helpfully informs us, with a brief sketch of each key individual.

    Take Kwasi Kwarteng, for instance. The BBC’s Lora Jones tells us he is not lacking in “intellectual firepower”, has a “double first from Cambridge University and a PhD in economic history” and, in the same gushing paragraph, is a “past winner of notoriously tough BBC quiz show University Challenge”. Notoriously tough? It’s hardly deep.

    When I was younger, I might have been impressed by this description. I’d have thought: here’s a well-educated and clever individual, the sort we want running the country. But experience has shown – albeit I was typically slow on the uptake – that there is no reason to suspect someone who is ‘well-educated’ in our culture to have sounder judgement or more wisdom than someone who is not. What our education system does do is make people more skillful at arguing a point-of-view, be it reasonable or perverse.

    If we simply filled the cabinet with twelve adults selected randomly from the street, would the resulting government make worse decisions? As for expertise: our leaders might not know much about their respective briefs, but that wouldn’t be a change. As for wisdom: it seems to me that it would make no difference whether or not someone has finished school and attended university, because our education system does not teach it.

    In Religion for Atheists, Alain de Botton describes the failure of education to help us navigate our way through life. He set up his School of Life to address the failure, but is battling against centuries of practice. Not even that charismatic social reformer, Charles Dickens, who railed against the education system’s obsession with “facts” in books such as Hard Times, apparently achieved much of a breakthrough.

    A wise education might address questions such as:

    • what is the purpose of your life?
    • how does fear of death affect our behaviour?
    • why do I feel the need to acquire lots of stuff?
    • how can we live in harmony with nature, and each other?
    • why do I repeat the same mistakes?
    • do you act in ways that make you and others happy?
    • do we inherit the Earth from our parents, or borrow it from our children?

    Even without conclusive answers, it might help us learn about ourselves and how to survive and enjoy life.

    A common rebuttal is that children need to learn basic skills first. What skills? Numeracy and literacy are most often cited. Yet the majority of us adults are pretty innumerate, unable to estimate quantities without resorting to a computer, and easily swayed by numbers taken out of context in the media. The teaching of this “basic skill” largely fails, a failure that undermines the pre-eminence it is given. Even if it were more successful, are we any happier than the Munduruku, an indigenous people in the Brazilian Amazon that have no words for numbers bigger than five? I love maths, which is usually misrepresented as arithmetic, but cannot see any compelling logic for the latter’s preferred status.

    Isn’t wisdom “basic”? Isn’t it more important to have a government that leads us wisely, than one which might perform well on a quiz show?