The tech behemoths have recognised our need for nuclear power

Nuclear is orders of magnitude safer than any other generating source.

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The last time the UK government tried to interest investors in nuclear power nearly 30 years ago, it did not go well.  The lack of confidence started with the name – British Energy – so as not to scare the financial horses with the n-word. Things never really improved. Few would touch the shares because of the unquantifiable liability, many decades in the future, of decommissioning the eight nuclear plants the company owned. 

By 2006, it became apparent that the market could not be persuaded to love nuclear, and the UK government managed to bribe France’s EDF into taking the business on. EDF had a reputation for competence thanks to successfully running plants in France. We know now that even that experience was not enough to overcome the UK’s world-leading ability to add cost and complexity to any big project, and EDF’s commitment to building Hinkley Point has essentially bankrupted the company. 

Last month, another nail was banged into the nuclear power coffin, driven by the National Audit Office. Sellafield, the current name for Windscale, is nursing most of Britain’s nuclear waste. The NAO report is not a pretty sight. The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority reckons the task will take until 2125 (not a misprint!) at an estimated cost of £138bn. The estimate has risen much faster than inflation since the NDA last looked in 2019.

Still, the nuclear protagonists are backing a better idea now, with mini-nukes, merely the size of a football stadium. You would hardly notice them next door. They are definitely an attractive idea, and Roll-Royce, builder of power plants for nuclear submarines, is competing for a government contract. Yet even here the British obsession with process above all is hard at work. 

The competition was launched in March last year, and there are four finalists. Someday, maybe, we will pick the winner, who will then start the process again. Meantime, Rolls has won an actual contract to build a mini-nuke for the Czech Republic. If history is any guide, the plant will be operating before construction here has even started. 

These minis look attractive, not least because the contract is a more manageable size. Unfortunately, they, too, may face the same decommissioning problem as their big brothers. There are currently 27 old nuclear-powered subs awaiting the process. It has only just started on the first of them, which has been quietly rotting for 44 years.

And yet, this is the season where ghosts rise up from their coffins and surprise us. Nuclear power as a whole gets a bad rap. It is orders of magnitude safer than any other generating source, and demand for clean electricity will far exceed the capacity of windmills and sunshine, so we are going to need it. There are glimmers of hope here, as the biggest tech companies are now large enough to shoulder the risk. Microsoft is partnering to reopen Three Mile Island, the site of the worst meltdown in the US (nobody died). Amazon is investing in a nuclear developer. Both need reliable electricity to run their data centers, and suspect that the public grid may not be able to supply it. 

So where successive governments have feared to tread, the tech behemoths are taking the initiative. We may rant at their vast market power, but at least it means they have the financial strength to back a realistic solution to the world’s need for more and more clean energy.