Hartlepool - Observer
Posted: 22nd September 2025
The announcement last week that a dozen new nuclear power stations are to
be built in Hartlepool is unlike anything else that has ever been attempted
in the UK. At a projected cost of £10bn – a rough estimate that could well
balloon – two companies, Centrica, the parent of British Gas, and X-energy,
a US startup, are proposing to develop and build a completely novel type of
nuclear power plant. The technical challenges for the two businesses are
huge; the financial challenges perhaps even more so. Centrica is a large
company with a big balance sheet, but it has limited nuclear experience.
X-energy is a startup with some nuclear expertise, but which has raised
only about $1bn in private capital and $1.2bn from the US energy department
since the company was founded in 2009. Far more money than that will be
needed to complete the design, while the build of the fuel plant and
demonstrator reactors will also cost an order of magnitude more. Finishing
the detailed design of both reactor and fuel plant, and getting them
licensed to be built, is a work in progress but it will not be quick.
X-energy has tried to boost its financial resources by partnering with
potential users: the first is chemical producer Dow, for which X-energy is
proposing to build a station to power a plant on the Texas Gulf coast. No
UK government money is being proposed at this point, but Chris O’Shea,
chief executive of Centrica, floated the idea last week that the project
could be funded by a similar mechanism to the newly agreed Sizewell C
reactor. Under this plan, the £10bn that he says would be required to fund
building would be added incrementally to all UK consumers’ electricity
bills, to provide cashflow during construction. If that is what happens,
then far from being an inward investment, UK consumers will have provided
assistance to develop a US reactor design that it can sell elsewhere. The
hurdles that have to be cleared to get to that point are, however, huge.
There are technical difficulties that have stopped this design being used
before. The fuel is extremely complex and expensive to make. Some of the
materials required are very scarce, including the nuclear component itself,
which would mostly be available from Russia. It is far from clear that this
kind of reactor can be commercially competitive against more traditional
designs.
Observer 21st Sept 2025
https://observer.co.uk/news/business/article/uk-to-build-12-nuclear-plants-in-10bn-plan