Re-Energising The Economy

Neil Craig writes:

We are heading for blackouts & already have some of the world's most expensive electricity. Ultimately without electricity we do not have industry & it doesn't matter how effectively the financial services industry makes everybody rich by selling pieces of paper to each other, without stuff being produced we have no wealth.

Previously I have said that all that is required is to allow builders of nuclear power stations to build & we will have unlimited energy & all get rich. I now think, to re-establish confidence it would be better for the government to sweep away almost all of the regulations & to hire the builders. Introduce immediate licensing of French & Canadian reactor designs & licence current & previous sites as being suitable for reactor building.

British nuclear is already, in practice, nationalised. Formalise it & set it up as a public company with a remit to start 6gw of new capacity each year (12 in the first year) which should take 4 years to complete. This would increase our capacity by 10% annually. Most current reactors are about 1gw but if 4 new 1.5 gw ones were started each year, using off the shelf designs & mass production method it would produce considerably cheaper electricity than even France's 1.3p a unit.

Assume each reactor costs about £1 billion which is actually higher than some & takes no account of the long production runs (mind you it also takes no account of having to pay nuclear engineers who we drove out of the country years ago, enough to come back - perhaps as much as a merchant banker). Half can be paid from the decommissioning fund by not disassembling old reactors at current sites but merely leaving them for 50 years till they were safe & a quarter by selling 10% of the shares &/or borrowing against future electricity. Having 10% in private hands & putting day to day management in their hands should keep it free of political action. This would therefore cost the Exchequer about 2 x 1/4 x £1 billion annually which is much less than we now waste on windmills.

We have had years of the political elite telling us we must make do without growth & introducing ridiculous, usually "environmental", regulations to enforce it. Well that is what we have got & it looks like nobody actually likes it. We can & should try the opposite.