Hinkley Point C was supposed to cost eighteen billion pounds and start generating electricity by 2027. That was the figure they presented to parliament. That was the deal.
In February, EDF announced it will now be 2030 at the earliest. The cost, adjusted for inflation, has reached £49 billionn. That's nearly triple the original budget. The thing has been under construction for the better part of a decade and has not produced a single watt of electricity. EDF, by the way, is a French state-owned company.
In other words, we are paying a French government enterprise £49 billionn to build us a reactor that a French government enterprise cannot deliver on time or on budget.
Here is what makes this actively maddening rather than merely depressing. Rolls-Royce has a small modular reactor programme ready to deploy at Wylfa, on Anglesey, where a decommissioned nuclear site already exists. British company. British design. A fraction of the cost per unit. The technology works; the site is there; the only missing ingredient is a government capable of signing a piece of paper without convening a fourteen-year consultation process first.
That could be your cheap energy. Your money back in your pocket at the end of the month.
But that is not how Britain works. Not how we build things any more. Now, our sole industrial output is consultation frameworks. Environmental review stages, which then of course subside it review stages of the review stages, and stakeholder engagement processes whose principal stakeholders are the same consultants hired to manage them.
Hinkley is not an aberration, but the system working exactly as designed. The system was just never designed to produce energy. It was designed to produce process, and by God, it has delivered.
The Strait of Hormuz is still closed. We are rationing petrol at the forecourt. Our flagship nuclear project, the one that was going to secure British energy independence - and, remember, energy independence is independence - will not generate power until the end of the decade, at the earliest, at a cost that has now exceeded twice what parliament was told it would be.
£49 billion. Just one cost line on an inventory of failures stretching through the decades, and it will keep climbing for as long as we keep employing the people responsible for not doing them.
@SharePickers 4 to 5 year payback - this will likely shorten with increasing energy costs. 18k annual pre installation spend, now sub 6k which also includes 2 EV.
Nov to Feb is a slog but all good thereafter!
@DCAdditivePros@it_unprofession Policy will likely be cancelled ab initio and premium refunded. You will be obliged to declare this as a material fact at any following insurance submission.
The SEC failed to catch any of FTX, Celsius, BlockFi, Terra, or 3AC but did manage to sue Coinbase, Kraken, and Uniswap (who harmed nobody)
Oh and ignored pink sheet fraud to do this.
@mcuban is right, Dems need to abandon this strategy or they will lose the election.
@21blacky Fortune favours the brave!
I resisted calls from others to cash out when my totals hit milestones and as you know it paid off for me.
My advice is to definitely scale out slowly on the way up though as the elevator down can be quick and HMRC wait for no man.