New Reactors

The prospects for new nuclear reactors at Sellafield are not encouraging. A company called NuGen,  is currently planning to build up to 3.6GW of new nuclear capacity on a site called Moorside, immediately adjacent to Sellafield. NuGen was originally owned by the French company GDF Suez, the Spanish company Iberdrola, and Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE). In September 2011 SSE pulled out and sold its 25% stake to GDF Suez and Iberdrola.⁽¹⁾ Then in January 2014 Toshiba-owned Westinghouse Electric Company agreed to buy all Iberdrola’s stake and another 10% from GDF-Suez giving it a 60% controlling stake.⁽²⁾

Westinghouse plans to build three AP1000 reactors with a combined capacity of 3.4GW at the Moorside site next to Sellafield in partnership with GDF Suez. The first of the reactors is expected to be online in 2024.⁽³⁾ Toshiba-owned Westinghouse will supply the reactors, while GDF-Suez will run the site. Westinghouse will manufacture the fuel for the new AP1000 reactors at Springfields, a UK-licensed fuel manufacturing facility near Preston.⁽⁴⁾

The AP1000 reactor design still requires regulatory approval by the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) and the Environment Agency (EA) under the Generic Design Assessment process.  The two regulators completed their planned assessment of the AP1000 reactor design in 2011 and issued an interim Design Acceptance Confirmation (iDAC) and an interim Statement of Design Acceptability (iSODA). But Westinghouse’s iDAC contained 51 so-called “GDA Issues”, which will need to be resolved before a full Design Acceptance Confirmation is issued.⁽⁵⁾ According to i-Nuclear,⁽⁶⁾ some of the GDA Issues are expected to be easily answered or resolved, while others could require improvements to the safety case or even design changes. The company expects to obtain Generic Design Assessment (GDA) approval in mid-2016.⁽⁷⁾

Toshiba is promising to build its first AP1000 in the UK in half the time planned to complete the first EPR reactor at Hinkley Point. Toshiba claims it would take only four years to build the first of three reactors. This would only be a year after the first EPR despite the fact that construction at Hinkley is due to start in 2015. Simon Marshall, the programme director for Westinghouse in the UK, also said that the consortium would demand a lower price than the EPR – the AP1000 reactor type would be cheaper because it had a modular design that had been used before. In contrast, EDF Energy’s design was one of the first of a new generation, pushing up costs.⁽⁸⁾

Reader in Energy Politics at Aberdeen University, Dave Toke, says evidence from the USA casts a lot of doubt on hopes the AP1000 design will be cheaper than Hinkley C. Toshiba will need to find investors, which may be hard to find, even though, no doubt they will (like Hinkley C but unlike renewable energy schemes) be offered a very valuable amount of loan guarantees from the UK Treasury.⁽⁹⁾

Meanwhile, a joint lawsuit filed in Tokyo by 1,415 plaintiffs, including 38 Fukushima residents and 357 people from outside Japan, say the manufacturers of Fukushima reactors – Toshiba, GE and Hitachi – failed to make needed safety improvements to the four decade-old reactors. They are seeking compensation of 100 yen ($1) each, saying their main goal is to raise awareness of the problem. General Electric, Toshiba and Hitachi have walked away without paying a cent towards the compensation for the many thousands of victims or the enormous cost of decontaminating the radioactivity spewed from their reactors.⁽¹⁰⁾

If Toshiba can indeed build a reactor in four years it will seem very odd if Sizewell C is being built at the same time. Construction at Sizewell is unlikely to start before 2018 – at least two years later than expected, but electricity isn’t expected to be generated until 2028.⁽¹¹⁾

Similar reactors being built by AREVA at Olkiluoto in Finland and by EDF at Flamanville in France are both late and over budget. Olkiluoto is now expected to be up to nine years late⁽¹²⁾ and about 5 billion euros over budget.⁽¹³⁾ Flamanville is five years late and is expected to cost 8.5 billion euros rather than the 3.3 billion first forecast.⁽¹⁴⁾ Both reactors have the same long list of safety and construction problems.

See “What’s Wrong with Building New Reactors”, November 2012 for some of the arguments against building new reactors