Flagship U.K. Nuclear Project Faces Further Price Hike and Delays

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Written by Martin Lynch, European News Editor for Industrial Info (Galway, Ireland)--The future of a new wave of nuclear power project development in the U.K. has been thrown further into doubt as news that the first new nuclear power project in the U.K. in decades, Hinkley Point C, is facing another hike in costs and potential delays.

U.K. developer EDF Energy, part of French energy giant Électricité de France SA (EPA:EDF) (Paris, France), has admitted that costs could rise by £2.9 billion ($3.6 billion), almost double the previous total of £1.5 billion ($1.8 billion) announced in 2017. The planned commissioning date of 2025 could also be impacted. The company has blamed the cost increase on "challenging ground conditions" that have bumped up the costs of earthworks considerably. It now believes that the completion costs will sit in between £21.5 billion ($26.4 billion) and £22.5 billion ($27.7 billion), an increase of £1.9 billion to £2.9 billion.

"Cost increases reflect challenging ground conditions which made earthworks more expensive than anticipated, revised action plan targets and extra costs needed to implement the completed functional design, which has been adapted for a first-of-a-kind application in the U.K. context," said an EDF spokesperson in a statement. "The management of the project remains mobilised to begin generating power from Unit 1 at the end of 2025. To achieve this, operational action plans overseen by the project management are being put in place. These involve the EDF Group's engineering teams in Great Britain and France, buildings and ancillary works contractors, and suppliers of equipment and systems throughout the supply chain."

The Hinkley Point C plant in Somerset, southwest England, will use two European Pressurized Reactors (EPRs) with a generating capacity of 3,300 megawatts (MW), enough to meet 7% of the U.K.'s future electricity needs. In 2017, the company stated that the commissioning of the first reactor would be up to 15 months late, sometime in 2027, and that costs would rise by £1.5 billion ($1.9 billion). Last January, it revised that by saying that it would be delivered on time by 2025. For additional information, see January 24, 2018, article - U.K. Hinkley Nuclear Project Back on Track for 2025.

"New delays and cost overruns highlight why there are concerns around transferring more construction risk of new nuclear power stations," commented Jonathan Marshall, analyst at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), on BBC Radio 4.

Last month, EDF said the project reached a key milestone as work started to install the 38,000 concrete segments required to support the three underground marine tunnels below the seabed of the Bristol Channel. The tunnels are the heart of Hinkley Point C's cooling system and will have the capacity to transfer 120,000 litres of water per second.

In January, two planned U.K. nuclear projects bit the dust when Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy (Wilmington, North Carolina) shelved planned nuclear power projects at Wylfa and Oldbury and confirmed that it would take a loss of $2.77 billion already spent on the projects. For additional information, see January 28, 2019, article - Hitachi-GE Suspends Two U.K. Nuclear Projects.

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