Electricity prices from new nuclear plants will be sky high with more delays to completion while jobs don’t materialize.

If you wanted to sum up the most compelling reasons not to build new nuclear power plants, Hinkley Point C, the two-reactor project under construction in Somerset in the UK, encapsulates almost all of them.

When the UK government, still miraculously led by the clinging-by-his-fingernails beleaguered Labour prime minister, Keir Starmer, announced its Golden Age of nuclear last September, obediently gliding in Trump’s gilded wake, it claimed that the new nuclear power plants planned for Britain “will drive down household bills in the long run.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

Far from driving down consumer costs, the Hinkley Point C project, consisting of two 1,630 MW French Evolutionary Power Reactors (EPR), could see the original agreed strike price of $123.50 per megawatt — already considerably higher than the price Britons were paying at the time it was set in 2012 — soar even higher by the time the plant is finished, since prices are designed to increase annually in line with the Consumer Price Index.

The original estimated cost of $24 billion for the two Hinkley C EPRs has now almost tripled, having sky-rocketed to almost $67 billion as announced last week, along with new delays.

In 2007, when EDF first proposed its Hinkley Point C scheme, an officer with the company predicted locals would be cooking their turkeys using electricity from Hinkley C by Christmas 2017. That’s the same year — in March — that construction eventually began. 

The Hinkley C completion date has now been pushed to at least 2030, another deadline extension it probably won’t meet. If the plant does show up in 2030, it will have taken 22 years, 13 longer than planned. 

That’s a long time to wait for those new jobs the UK government’s ‘Golden Age’ promised. “Working people will benefit from jobs and growth as companies in the UK and United States sign major new deals that will turbocharge the build-out of new nuclear power stations in both countries,” said that September announcement, embracing yet more hyperbolic rhetoric.

Several days after announcing the new cost hikes at Hinkley, news broke about similarly soaring electricity prices predicted for the Sizewell C nuclear power plant, another French twin EPR plant targeted for the steadily eroding and submerging UK Suffolk coast. 

The Sizewell C project was first proposed in 2010 but there are still no shovels in the ground for the plant itself, only site preparation (for that, read tearing up countryside and precious habitat.)

As revealed in an article in the Daily Telegraph, electricity generated from Sizewell C is likely to cost “almost double today’s prices”. The prediction is a staggering $160 per megawatt hour, and that’s according to the government’s own new report.

Incredibly, despite the track record at Hinkley C, with identical reactor designs to Sizewell, this same government report “assumed no escalation in costs” for the Suffolk project. Such an outcome is, to put it mildly, highly unlikely.

In an recent analysis for OilPrice.com, Leonard S. Hyman, an economist and financial analyst, and William I. Tilles, a senior industry advisor and speaker on energy and finance, predicted that “the prospects for new nuclear (both big and small) are deader than the proverbial doornail.”

They viewed the outlook for the so-called small modular reactors that the UK government is poised to green light as even bleaker. (At around 490MW the favored design from Rolls-Royce isn’t actually that small.) Small reactors will have “projected costs that are much higher than gigawatt-scale reactors, making them even less relevant economically,” they wrote.

And yet, the Starmer and Trump governments each press on with their false and fantastical nuclear fantasy plans regardless.

Linda Pentz Gunter is the founder of Beyond Nuclear and serves as its international specialist. Her book, No To Nuclear. Why Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress and Provokes War, can be pre-ordered now from Pluto Press. (Use the scroll menu at the top of the page to select dollars or pounds for payment.)

Headline photo of money symbols by ARABCREATOR7/Wikimedia Commons.