An incoming Labour government would not renege on any Sizewell C financing deal agreed by the government before the next general election, a member of the shadow energy ministerial team has said.
At a fringe meeting at last week’s Labour conference, sponsored by the Nuclear Industries Association (NIA), recently appointed shadow consumers and clean power minister Jeff Smith said the party is “committed to get Sizewell C over the line”.
Quizzed on whether Labour would support any financing deal for the project that the government secures prior to the next election, he said: “If there is a deal that can be done about Sizewell C, I don’t think we would be looking at scuppering it if we get into power.”
Smith also confirmed the party’s plans to absorb the government’s recently established Great British Nuclear (GBN) agency into Great British Energy, the wider-ranging public company Labour is proposing to set up.
Welcoming Smith’s commitment to GBN, NIA chief executive Tom Greatrex said: “The worst thing that can happen is that now finally we’ve got some momentum and we’re starting to see things happen, we then run the risk of it all stopping because there’s going to be election.”
He said small modular reactors (SMRs) are “probably not” going to help deliver Labour’s goal to decarbonise the electricity generation by 2030 because they will not be deployed in time.
However, Greatrex said that SMRs could be “easily” rolled out in the 2030s, by which time the bulk of the UK’s existing nuclear power stations will have been decommissioned.
“That capacity is going to be gone round about 2030, possibly into the early 2030s. You shouldn’t think that if you can find a way to get to 2030 and have zero emissions, you’ve done the job. You’ve got to have everything to carry through the 2030s, 2040s, 2050s and beyond.”
A competition being conducted by the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero has recently shortlisted six SMR designs.
Work could start “pretty quickly” on SMRs if the government sticks to its stated competition timetable, Greatrex said, while adding that some reactor designs have yet to receive regulatory approval.
Labour’s Charlotte Nichols, co-chair of the Nuclear All Party Parliamentary Group, criticised what she described as the government’s obsession with such competitions.
“There is no prize at the end, there is no site licence to deliver proof of concept. It’s pitching all of our sovereign SMR capacity against each other instead of fostering the collaboration we need in order to get some of this stuff actually built. That will be Labour’s approach.”
Commenting on resistance by wildlife environmental campaigners to big infrastructure projects, like Sizewell C, she said: “This is nationally important infrastructure. State intervention is going to be important and being willing to face up and have difficult conversations with people and move to a place of consensus.”