A tale of two power policies

Carl Mortished: Analysis

It is a marriage of necessity that some will not like, but it is hard to see how Britain could even think of building half the nuclear plant needed without a French takeover of British Energy. If EDF manages to fund and complete the takeover, there will be an inexorable process of transforming Britain’s decaying nuclear industry into one of streamlined Gallic efficiency. Areva will take over Sellafield and introduce some order to the mess left by its old management.
Britain should be ashamed of what it did to its nuclear industry, not least because Britons invented civil nuclear power. The first nuclear-generated kilowatt hours were British. So were the first cost overruns and the first nuclear accident, at Windscale.
France had two advantages: the benefit of the experience of a neighbour and a threat of energy deprivation. France began its nuclear project in 1973, after the first Arab oil embargo. Over ten years, it created a conveyor belt of industrial technology, ending up with a nuclear near-monopoly, controlled by EDF.
Britain went a different way, developing oil and gasfields in the North Sea. North Sea oil and gas is a free-market jungle with all the pros and cons. A host of British and foreign companies compete fiercely. It has given us, at times, very cheap gas, but also inefficiency as the building of pipelines is held up by squabbles.

In France, no such problem affects the power sector, where the accent is on process control. The French are good at this. Arguably, the British are better at pure invention, lateral thinking and disruptive ideas. We do not warm to rule books.
Bernard Dupraz, EDF’s head of generation, says that the task is to “standardise, standardise and standardise”. Identical reactors are run according to identical rules. Some people will not like it, but right now we have no choice.