There's nothing private sector about this PS16bn nuclear station; RHODRI MORGAN Mr Wales writes exclusively for the Western Mail.
Byline: RHODRI MORGANICOULD barely believe my ears when I heard the announcement this week of the new nuclear power station to be built at Hinkley Point in Somerset, right opposite Cardiff Airport.
The BBC kept referring to it as Britain's first-ever private sector nuclear power station.
What the report should have said was that it was to be built by a consortium of four nationalised industries, two French and two Chinese.
Three of the four are 100% state-owned and one is 85%. Overseas nationalised industries are not in the private sector.
In fact I doubt if any private sector company could ever build and operate a nuclear power station now, because they would never be able to get insurance cover.
When the last British nuclear power station was built - Sizewell C - in the late 1980s, it was built by the Central Electricity Generating Board, led by Lord (Walter) Marshall, Margaret Thatcher's favourite scientist.
He was from Cardiff. The Cardiff accent, which he never lost, was so unfamiliar to his super-brainy colleagues in the atomic power industry that they all thought he was one of the many wartime refugees from Eastern Europe, who had fled the Nazis.
EDF, the lead company in the consortium that will build the new Hinkley Point "nuke" is the French equivalent of the CEGB.
The CEGB was privatised in 1989. It became Npower, now German-owned.
That's why we now have to turn to the French and Chinese.
But regardless of which country's nationalised industries are building the station, "ours" or "theirs", beware the promises about prices you hear, when a new design of power station hoves into view.
The new Hinkley station will replace an Advanced Gas Cooled Reactor-type station.
The launch of that particular type of station back in 1965 was the occasion of the most embarrassing statement any cabinet minister has ever made. Ever!
Fred Lee was the hapless energy minister in Harold Wilson's Labour government who had to deliver the statement to the House of Commons. It contained the sentence "Electricity from these new AGR nuclear power stations will be too cheap to meter. [I'm not making this up.] Britain has really hit the jackpot this time".
Oy Vey! Oy Vey! Far from producing electricity that was too cheap to meter, the AGRs were almost impossible to construct - an absolute disaster of Concorde or even Poll Tax proportions when it came to wasting taxpayers' money.
The new station will certainly create a building boom in the south-west of England.
When people compare the Welsh economy with that of the South West, we normally think instinctively, Wales - private sector economy weak/public sector strong. The South West - private sector strong/public sector weak.
I wonder if that's really true.
We get conventional regional assistance, European aid etc.
The South West gets its "regional aid" under a different heading, that's all. It's called a government-guaranteed PS16bn building project creating 25,000 jobs.
CAPTION(S):
Prime Minister David Cameron speaks to workers at Hinkley nuclear power station in Somerset on Monday
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| Title Annotation: | Features |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Western Mail (Cardiff, Wales) |
| Geographic Code: | 4EUUK |
| Date: | Oct 26, 2013 |
| Words: | 506 |
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