A small valley in Somerset is slowly disappearing, one dumper truck at a time.
Seven months after Theresa May gave her blessing to the £18bn Hinkley Point C project, work is gathering pace on what will be Britain’s first new nuclear power station since the 1990s. The once grassy valley, carrying the Holford stream towards the Bristol Channel, is being filled with earth and rubble excavated from the adjacent construction site.
Last month concrete pouring started on the first permanent structures: an 8km network of tunnels that will carry piping and cables around the site. Hinkley is one of the biggest construction projects in Europe, with dozens of cranes, cement silos and giant earthmoving vehicles scattered across the scarred ground.
There are tougher tests to come if EDF, the French utility leading the project, is to meet its target to be producing electricity from the two new reactors planned for Hinkley by 2025. But Vincent de Rivaz, head of EDF in the UK, says work is on schedule. “People have not been recognising the success of EDF in getting to where we are,” he says. “Aligning the planets in London, Paris, Beijing and Brussels was not easy but we did it.”
Mr de Rivaz is referring to the years of wrangling to secure political and financial support — including a £6bn investment from CGN, the Chinese state-controlled nuclear group — and the overcoming of EU state-aid obstacles.
Yet as one set of hurdles is cleared, another is looming. French nuclear regulators are investigating potential safety problems with steel components destined for Hinkley from a foundry suspected of falsifying quality-assurance documents.
The probe involves Areva, the French nuclear reactor manufacturer and close partner of EDF, and has already caused temporary shutdowns of several existing reactors in France to check for faults.
Mr de Rivaz says he is confident Areva will solve the problems at its Le Creusot foundry, in eastern France, in time to supply Hinkley but insists there are alternative sources if necessary. “It is absolutely crystal clear that all the components for Hinkley Point C will come from suppliers that meet the requirements of the UK nuclear regulator,” he says.
For EDF and Areva, avoiding hold-ups at Hinkley is crucial to restoring faith in their European Pressurised Reactor technology. Construction managers at the site say they have learnt lessons from the long delays and big cost-overruns that have beset EPR projects at Flamanville in France and Olkiluoto in Finland.
How Hinkley will look when construction is completed © PA
Parts of the construction work that proved troublesome in those projects are being mocked up at Hinkley in full-scale steel and concrete models, allowing contractors to practise before embarking on the real thing. More sophisticated computer modelling should also help and Nigel Cann, construction delivery director at Hinkley, says EDF’s relationship with its main contractors, such as engineering groups Laing O’Rourke and Bouygues, has been forged earlier and more deeply than elsewhere.
The site is overshadowed by EDF’s existing Hinkley Point B power station, due to be decommissioned in 2023, and Hinkley Point A, which closed in 2000. The new 3.2 gigawatt plant will meet about 7 per cent of UK electricity needs. Its timely completion is crucial to replacing old nuclear and coal-fired plants due to shut in the years ahead and to meeting UK commitments for reducing carbon emissions.
But critics continue to rail against what they see as Hinkley’s excessive cost. EDF has been promised a fixed price of £92.50 per megawatt hour of electricity produced for 35 years, based on 2012 prices and rising with inflation. This is more than twice the average wholesale electricity price of the past year.
Mr de Rivaz argues that Hinkley is competitive with the projected average of £130 per MW/h for subsidised renewable power, such as wind and solar, in 2021, although critics point out that these costs are falling fast. Mr de Rivaz says the cost of future nuclear plants will also be lower, including another planned by EDF at Sizewell in Suffolk, as the UK nuclear supply chain is rebuilt after decades of decay.
“Sizewell will be cheaper than Hinkley but it cannot be cheaper without Hinkley,” he says. “We have to start somewhere.”