Steven Chu warns UK its nuclear plans risk becoming financial drain

Former US energy chief and Nobel physicist says UK plan to build various types of reactors is expensive and time-consuming
Professor Steven Chu
Professor Steven Chu, former US energy secretary and a Nobel prizewinning physicist. Photograph: Graham Turner/Guardian

Steven Chu warns UK its nuclear plans risk becoming financial drain


A leading energy expert has warned that although the British government is right to proceed with new nuclear plants they risk becoming a “financial drain” unless they can be built on time and on budget.

Steven Chu, the former US energy secretary and Nobel prizewinning physicist, believes using a variety of reactor designs – as the UK looks poised to do – is not the best way to keep costs down.

“Unless we can learn to build nuclear on schedule and on budget it will be a financial drain. Other countries have learned how to do this: South Korea has built 10 plants exactly the same and the tenth plant was only 60% of the cost of the original one. The cost came marching down because they just kept doing the same thing,” he told the Guardian.

“That is true of all industries. If you build exactly the same its get cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. Everything different means it will cost more. You have to understand that. When the United States built its nuclear plants they were all different,” argued Chu who was President Obama’s energy secretary until April last year and is now a professor at Stanford University in California.

Atomic plants being built in Finland and France are much more expensive than forecast and are suffering significant delays but EDF, the company planning to build Hinkley Point C reactors in Somerset, says it will learn from those mistakes. While EDF plans to use an “EPR” design at Hinkley and possibly at Sizewell in Suffolk, other developers in Britain are planning different models.

Chu, who was in Britain giving this year’s Romanes Lecture at Oxford University, believes a key role for nuclear power will be to provide support for other low-carbon, but intermittent, power technologies such as wind and solar, of which he is a supporter.

“In the US, within a decade, onshore wind without subsidy is going to be less expensive than natural gas – even with natural gas staying at its current price which is two-and-a-half times less expensive than natural gas in the UK.

“I think England may be a different story in the sense that you have a lot of good wind resources but it’s a small country, and I know England is looking at another generation of nuclear reactors which I am in favour of: perhaps what we need is one more generation of nuclear reactors.”

Chu, whose current work includes research into more powerful and effective batteries, says: “Sometimes you will get 100% wind but other times the wind will not be blowing and you do need back-up power and that is going to come from fossil fuel or nuclear. What we will be able to do by mid-century is 50% of electricity from renewables if Europe shares its renewable resources … We would still need to capture carbon from fossil fuel-generating plants, also from cement and steel (manufacturing) plants.”

The Stanford professor is still worried that not enough progress is being made worldwide to tackle climate change but remains upbeat about Obama’s attempts to galvanise the US more, not least through the recent bilateral agreement with China. Would a Republican president in in 2016 represent a setback?

“A Republican presidency would not necessarily be a setback. It was a rabid anti-communist [Richard Nixon] who opened up China. That same president started the Environmental Protection Agency which is not considered part of the Republican agenda. Another Republican president [George Bush senior] stopped underground nuclear testing in the United States. He also put a cap and trade system in place on some emissions from power plants.

“Some leading Republicans support a carbon tax for instance. You start at $10-$15 per tonne and slowly make it rise to $60 or so. But you use those revenues for the people – you do not use those revenues for other government programmes. We have means of doing it, through higher social security cheques or helping the unemployed. You give it back to the American people.”

Chu dismisses concerns that a price on carbon could damage energy-intensive businesses pointing out that most oil companies now carry a “ghost price” for carbon on the books.

And he says tougher political action on climate change would bring new solutions itself. “As long as engineers know what is happening, if countries know that is happening then people will come up with technical solutions. Historically [solutions] arrive.”

As for the chance of a binding climate change agreement between countries at next year’s vital talks in Paris he says: “I think there is forward momentum. I hope [Paris] is better than Copenhagen. Do I have significant hope there will be a binding agreement among all countries, probably not. But my guess is that China will put a price on carbon during this government. Central government knows there is a huge risk [from climate change] their country faces.

“That is why they are working hard to diversify their energy supply and are the largest installer of wind and solar in the world as well as building 30-plus nuclear power plants and trying to develop their natural gas resources. So China is moving, major states in the US are moving but … I get nervous. We are not moving fast enough.