A £1bn nuclear white elephant  

The Independent has a look at the immense cost of nuclear power in the UK - A £1bn nuclear white elephant.

A controversial nuclear recycling plant, approved by the Government despite warnings over its economic viability and reliance on unproven technology, has racked up costs of more than £1bn and is still not working properly.

Backers of the plant at Sellafield, which promised to turn toxic waste into a useable fuel that could be sold worldwide, had claimed the plant would make a profit of more than £200m in its lifetime, producing 120 tonnes of recycled fuel a year. But after an investigation by The Independent, the Government admitted technical problems and a dearth in orders has meant it has produced just 6.3 tonnes of fuel since opening in 2001.

With construction and commissioning costs of more than £600m, the facility, known as the Mox plant because of the mixed oxides (Mox) fuel it is designed to produce, has cost more than £1.2bn, confirming its status as the nuclear industry's most embarrassing white elephant and one of the greatest failures in British industrial history, losing the taxpayer £90m a year. Green campaigners and opposition MPs are now calling for the plant to be closed immediately, and a minister who fought its construction at the time has called for a public inquiry into how the plant was ever given the go-ahead.

The revelations are a blow to the Government as it plans to lead Britain into a "nuclear renaissance", pinning its hopes on nuclear technology to help meet its ambitious targets on reducing carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2050. A spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said the performance of the plant was "clearly disappointing".

The Government had tried to keep details of the plant's losses private. The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), the publicly funded body which owns the plant, initally refused to release details of the losses, citing confidentiality agreements in commercial contracts. But in a table published by the Government on the day of the G20 summit, the embarrassing extent of the plant's losses was finally disclosed.

Michael Meacher, who tried to block approval for the plant as Environment minister, said: "This waste of taxpayer's money is unforgivable. The construction of the plant was resisted for years. But that was overridden by Tony Blair on the basis of assurances from the nuclear industry that the Mox plant would be cost-effective and a market for its fuel would develop.

"These claims have proved illusory. But even the most pessimistic judgement never predicted that the first decade of its operations would fritter away two-thirds of a billion pounds on generating no more than 4 per cent of its target production. There should be a public inquiry into this scandal and those responsible should be held to account." ...

Opposition MPs slammed the performance of the facility. "The Mox plant at Sellafield has proved to be a costly white elephant and a black hole for taxpayers' money," said Simon Hughes, the climate change spokesman for the Liberal Democrats. "This is a prime example of Labour's misguided and hugely expensive continuing love affair with nuclear power. Building a new generation of nuclear power stations is throwing billions of pounds of good money after bad. They are never built on time or on budget and they will not solve the UK's energy needs."