Is Hinkley C going the same way as the French and Finnish EPR disasters??

As EDF announces major cost overruns and delays after having only recently started major construction works for Hinkley C, it seems that this project is heading for the same sort of financial disasters suffered already by the other two European Pressurised Reactors (EPRs) being built in Finland and France. Yet the Government is going ahead with a financial model, the 'Regulated Asset Base' (RAB) to finance the next EPR at Sizewell C, that would mean electricity consumers would have to pay for cost overruns over and above EDF's own ridiculously low estimates of costs.

EDF has announced cost overruns of up to £2.9 billion pounds and delays for HPC that almost certainly mean it will not be generating in 2025. This is on top of the already high cost of building EPRs - at a cost to the electricity consumer of £92.10 in 2012 prices (now over £100 per MWh), and even that is only so 'low' because the contract involves paying this price (inflation uprated) over 35 years!

EDF, in its statement issued today talks about the project being 'first of a kind' (in the UK). But the project is not 'first of a kind' at all when we look at similar designs being implemented in Finland (Olkiluoto) and France (Flamanville), still uncompleted over many years and with costs in these cases having risen to more than three times their initial estomates. Who would put any money on this being the last cost overrun announcement for Hinkley C from EDF? Certainly not me!

In fact EDF only started 'pouring concrete' on the base of the plant in Spring this year, so if there are cost overruns and delays projected now, much much worse is likely to come.

The most outrageous aspect of this affair is that EDF expect us to believe that Sizewell C will be substantially cheaper to build than even the projections EDF made before the latest cost overrun announcement. The Government has in effect agreed it will swallow such a projection by EDF and then undertake to saddle electricity consumers with cost overruns over and above these absudly low estimates.

With offshore wind costs having fallen to well under a half of the cost of Hinkley C, it seems especially odd that the Government should be giving financial preference to new nuclear power. Yet new nuclear power will make integration of renewables more difficult since the nuclear power will, according to their contracts, always run meaning more times that there will be excess renewable electricity generation. Of course, as suggested in the my last post, any excess renewable energy generation (which would happen even without nuclear power beiung on the system) could  be used to generate hydrogen (via electrolysis). This could be used in fuel cells to produce electricity when there was a shortage of wind or sun. This beggars the question, though, of why we are not investing in this technology alongside renewables rather than pouting more and more money down a nuclear black hole and slowing down the decarbonisaion process as a result.

See https://www.ft.com/content/92102452-df62-11e9-9743-db5a370481bc