The UK currently has ten nuclear power stations supplying 20% of our electricity needs (and about 4% of our overall energy needs), but these will come to the end of their working lives within the next 30 years.

Building new nuclear reactors in the UK

In January, Government announced its aspirations for the private sector to build up to ten new plants to replace them, with the first to be built by 2018.

It is likely that existing sites such as Sizewell in Suffolk, Dungeness in Kent and Hinkley Point in Somerset would be redeveloped with new designs of reactor. Waste would be stored in a £20bn deep geological repository, possibly under the sea off Carlisle.

The new reactors will be based on proven generic designs and each one is currently estimated to cost around £1bn to construct. A partnership with France, which has a far bigger nuclear sector, is intended to help boost our domestic industry, though there are fears that a shortage of engineers – of all kinds – will have an impact on construction schedules.

Paying for construction and decommissioning

As the technology is now proven and mature, the UK Government has rightly pledged that any new generation of stations – and the costs of storing their radioactive waste and decommissioning them at the end of their lives - will not be paid for by taxpayers. If this ambition is realised it will be the first time that nuclear plants have been built without public subsidy anywhere in the world.

Criticisms of nuclear power in the UK

Critics of the scheme suggest that new nuclear power will only cut between 4% and 8% from UK’s emissions, and then only after 2025 when the new plants come fully on-line. Others highlight the unknown but already vast cost of decommissioning our existing nuclear power stations (£75bn and rising) and argue forcefully that the money needed to build, operate and decommission new ones would be better invested in boosting energy efficiency measures, carbon capture and renewable technologies.