Hinkley Point C nuclear power station

It's just another one of those massive upfront investments.

Take Hinkley Point C in Britain.

As Europe's largest construction project, it's now years behind schedule and billions over budget.

It has become bad PR for nuclear power.

Unfortunately, Britain is not only ill-suited for solar and wind generation, it is also the most expensive place in the world to build a new nuclear power station.

According to Sam Dimitru, Hinkley Point C, which is currently being built, will cost six times more to build per megawatt than its South Korean equivalent.

France and Finland, which used the same reactor design, managed to build them for about 50% less per megawatt.

South Korea have kept their costs lower by building fleets of reactors benefiting from economies of scale.

Yeah, I mean, there's going to be an easier target than others.

I went to a few months back to see the building of Hinkley Point C, which is incredible.

Yeah,

yeah.

And in fact, we know it's going to be, uh, there, there's gonna be downward pressure on the Nth of a kind cost for, uh, for certain reactor designs.

We, we've seen that as well, even the, the EPR design that EDF, um, is building at Hinkley Point C, even HPC to Sizewell C, um, you know, a significant reduction, um, in cost on Sizewell C single reactor versus the EPR at Hinkley Point.

So, um, it all kind of adds up to the fact that we're gonna have certainty around cost that, you know, is relatively manageable.

Um, these are still not, um, you know, inexpensive projects, but that being said, um, today if we were to build another Aspen Power Station, 370 megawatt, um, gas-fired power station, we'd be looking at, you know, $2.5 to $3 billion if we started today for a gas-fired station.

So as we, as we move on and, and kind of, uh, think about how you sustain that workforce, how you train, how you retain and develop the workforce, obviously from, from a 5% Club, our, our mission is to, to ambassador and promote earn-as-you-learn schemes, so it would be remiss of me not to sit here and ask you about how has G4S earned apprenticeships and earn-as-you-learn schemes, um, to, to help you build that workforce and build the legacies that you are building within those communities.

Going back 10, 12 years, um, ago, we, um, starting, starting to go into, um, the early works at Hinkley, and, um, one of the development consent or obligation, obligations for Hinkley Point C is they, they were gonna deliver 1,000 apprenticeships as part of the build.

Um, so we were asked, you know, "What can you do?" Uh, so, um, and we were looking at our training program because just having an SA license wasn't, uh, wasn't gonna work for us, so we, we developed a, an enhanced security officers course.

But we then needed to go up and beyond that for supervisors and junior managers and things.

And so that works out, depending on the exchange rate, it's sort of somewhere between $15 and $16 a watt less per, right, for, for, for their CapEx.

Now, that is higher than Vogtle, right? That's, I mean, that's, it, it, it's more than Vogtle, more than probably, um, Hinkley Point C.

I mean, so and guess who gets to pay the bill for this? M- Canadian taxpayer.

Me.

You then need your fuel handling and everything else.

So if you want to get a sense of the overall scale, Not dissimilar to Sizewell C or Hinkley Point C, the big civil...

And that's just for

one tokamak at the centre of it?

They cannot make any major industrial project work.

Their Hinkley Point is decades behind and about three times over cost.

HS2, that's their high speed railway.

It doesn't work.