It took 15 years to complete and cost twice the original budget. If commercial companies had built the plant the cost of borrowing would have pushed the total over the £4 billion mark. It would take more than six similar nuclear power plants to supply 20% of Britain’s electricity. According to Dr Dave Toke, both land-based and off-shore windfarms would supply the same amount of energy for a similar cost of around £25 billion. At that point the cost-bias moves in favour of wind energy, as fuel costs are free and decommissioning is much, much less expensive. Walt Patterson, an associate fellow in the Energy, Environment and Development programme at Chatham House, makes the point that on the two counts of tackling climate change and insuring security of supply, nuclear energy is the slowest, most expensive, least flexible and riskiest option.

Michael Meacher, the former British Environment Minister for the Labour Party, believes that, given the costs and the risks, the private sector would not invest in nuclear facilities unless the government underwrites the loans and provided tax relief for the industry. This will be difficult to do in the present European economic climate. Adris Piebalgs, the commissioner for energy in the European Commission, wants to see different forms of energy compete against each other on a level playing field and will not countenance the use of state funds to subsidize nuclear power.

If economics is undermining the viability of building new nuclear power stations, the time it takes to build a nuclear power station may be a further nail in the coffin of the industry. The only nuclear power plant at present being built in Europe is at Oikiluoto in Finland. This is a relatively new design which is schedule to be completed in 2009. There simply is not the capacity to start a massive nuclear building programme in Britain or around the world. In October 2005, Ian Fells an energy consultant told a conference at Rimini in Italy that there are only six building corporations in the world capable of building nuclear power stations. None of those companies were British and the specialized personnel who built the last British nuclear plant Sizewell B are either retired or dead. Even to retain the nuclear status-quo in Britain would now require the building of eight to ten nuclear power stations, which have no hope of being completed and operational before 2025.

Other rich countries face similar problems: Australia is probably unique in that between 85-90% of its electricity is generated by coal-fired plants. This adds hugely to Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. In April 2006, Peter Costello, the Federal Treasure, warned Australians that they would need to develop a domestic nuclear power industry as part of the solution to global warming. Dr. Iain McGill, Research Co-ordinator for the Centre for Energy and Environmental Markets at the University of New South Wales responded to the Treasurer by pointing out that it would take between forty and fifty, 1000-megawatt nuclear power plants to substitute for the coal-fired ones. Realistically, such a programme would take decades to achieve.

Dr. Mark Diesendorf another scientist at the Institute of Environmental Studies at the same university also pointed out how costly such a venture would be. According to him a 1000 megawatt nuclear plant would cost at least $A 3 billion to build which is two-and-a-half times that of a coal-fired plant. To embark on such a massive building programme over twenty years would add significantly to Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. He believes that it would take forty years to break-even in terms of CO2 emissions. ‘You would have a big spike in CO2 emissions...I think the whole thing is insane’, he said of the suggestion that nuclear power could help fight global warming.

Even without factoring in de-commissioning, the costs of alternative energies like wind are now almost as cheap as nuclear power. While the nuclear industry claims that nuclear power can produce a kilowatt hour of electricity for three pence (Sterling), this is disputed by other sources. A 2005 report from a London-based think-tank called the New Economics Foundation estimated that the cost of a kilowatt-hour of electricity generated from a nuclear power source would cost 8.3 pence, once realistic construction and running costs are included. The U.K. Royal Academy of Engineers put the cost of a kilowatt hour of electricity generated from gas at 3.4 pence, 5 pence for coal and 7.2 for wind.

Despite the fact that Prime Minister Tony Blair put rebuilding nuclear plants back on the agenda in July 2006, many people believe that economic arguments will scuttle the proposal to build new nuclear power plants. According to Tom Burke, a visiting professor at both Imperial College, London and University College London, ‘Nuclear power stations are financially risky projects. You spend hundreds of millions of pounds for at least a decade before you start to recover any earnings. Since you have to pay for the financing as well as the direct construction costs, this makes nuclear much less attractive to investors than any other form of electricity generation. The only way to make the nuclear option palatable to investors is to push up the price of electricity. The public will hardly tolerate such an action.