Letter Candida Whitmill, Managing director, Penultimate Power UK, I disagree with your leader “Nuclear Waste” (Apr 22). The government was sold a “best in class” new reactor, the EPR, that started out at a cost of £8 billion and was not encumbered with “first of a kind” complexities; other EPRs were at the time being built. Many years later, not one EPR has been successfully completed and it is the remedial costs of those outstanding projects that have inflicted deep wounds to both Areva, the French EPR designer, and the energy company EDF. It is a sad affair for a country that heroically built 56 reactors in 15 years. Hinkley C is just one nuclear option, though, and Amber Rudd is right to acknowledge that further delay is not a disadvantage. Private investment of millions of pounds are being invested in North Wales and Cumbria for different reactor designs. The government is also working on an additional nuclear element: small modular reactors. Built in a factory, trans ported to the site and installed underground, these will take only three years to build instead of ten. A small modular reactor industry would secure thousands of jobs for decades. We have never lost our superiority in submarine-based nuclear; it is time to take back our superiority in civil nuclear. Small modular reactors could do just that.
Times 27th April 2016 read more »