Month: June 2024

Revisiting the UK’s nuclear AGR programme: 1. On the uses of White Elephants

This is the first of a series of three blogposts exploring the history of the UK’s nuclear programme. The pivot point of that programme was the decision, in the late 60’s, to choose, as the second generation of nuclear power plants, the UK’s home developed Advanced Gas Cooled Reactor (AGR) design, instead of a light water reactor design from the USA. This has been described as one of the worse decisions ever made by a UK government.

In this first post, I’ll explore the way the repercussions of this decision have influenced UK government thinking about large infrastructure projects. A second post will dig into the thinking that led up to the AGR decision. This will include a discussion of the basic physics that underlies nuclear reactor design, but it also needs to understand the historical context – and in particular, the way the deep relationship between the UK’s civil nuclear programme and the development of its indigenous nuclear weapons programme steered the trajectory of technology development. In a third post, I’ll consider how this historical legacy has influenced the UK’s stuttering efforts since 2008 to develop a new nuclear build programme, and try to draw some more general lessons.

There’s now a wide consensus that a big part of the UK’s productivity problem stems from its seeming inability to build big infrastructure. At a panel discussion about the UK’s infrastructure at the annual conference of the Bennett Institute, former Number 10 advisor Giles Wilkes estimated that the UK now has a £500 bn accumulated underinvestment in infrastructure, and identified HM Treasury as a key part of the system that has led to this. He concluded with three assertions:

1. “Anything we can do, we can afford”. A saying attributed to Keynes, to emphasise that money isn’t really the problem here – it is the physical capacity, skills base and capital stock needed to build things that provides the limit on getting things done.
2. Why haven’t we got any White Elephants? On the contrary, projects that were widely believed to be White Elephants when they were proposed – like the Channel Tunnel and Crossrail – have turned out to be vital. As Giles says, HM Treasury is very good at stopping things, so perhaps the problem is that HMT’s morbid fear of funding “White Elephants” is what is blocking us from getting useful, even essential, projects built.
3. The UK needs to show some humility. We should take time to understand how countries like Spain and Italy manage to build infrastructure so much more cheaply (often through more statist approaches).

Where does HM Treasury’s morbid fear of White Elephant infrastructure projects come from? I suspect a highly influential 1977 article by David Henderson – Two British Errors: Their Probable Size and Some Possible Lessons – lies at the root of this. The two errors in question were the Anglo-French Concorde programme, to build a supersonic passenger aircraft, and the Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor (AGR) programme of nuclear power stations.

It’s now conventional wisdom to point to Concorde and the AGR programme as emblems of UK state technological hubris and the failure of the industrial policy of the 1960s and 70s. The shadow of this failure is a major cultural blockage for any kind of industrial strategy.

Concorde was unquestionably a commercial failure, retired in 2003. But the AGR fleet is still running; they produce about 60 TWh of non-intermittent, low carbon power; in 2019 their output was equal in scale to the entire installed wind power base. The AGR fleet is already well beyond the end of its design life; all will be retired by the end of the decade, likely before any nuclear new build comes on stream – we will miss them when they are gone.

The most expensive error by the UK state? The bar on that has been raised since 1977.

The AGR programme has been described as one of the most expensive errors made by the UK state, largely on the strength of Hendersons’s article. Henderson was writing in 1977, so it’s worth taking another look at the programme as it looks forty years on. How big an error was it? The building of the AGR fleet was undoubtedly very badly managed, with substantial delays and cost overruns. Henderson’s upper estimate of the total net loss to be ascribed to the AGR programme was £2.1 billion.

What is striking now about this sum is how small it is, in the context of the more of recent errors. In 2021 money, this would correspond to a bit less than £14bn. A fairer comparison perhaps would be to express it as a fraction of GDP – in these terms it would amount to about £30bn. A relevant recent comparator to this is the net cost to the UK of energy price support following the gas price spike that the Ukraine invasion caused – this was £38.3bn (net of energy windfall taxes, some of which were paid by EDF in respect of the profits produced by the AGR fleet). Failing to secure the UK’s energy security was arguably a bigger error than the AGR programme.

“No-one knows anything” – Henderson’s flawed counterfactual, and the actual way UK energy policy turned out

In making his 1977 estimate of the £2.1bn net loss to the UK from adopting the AGR programme, Henderson had to measure the programme against a counterfactual. At the time, the choices were, in effect, two-fold. The counterfactual Henderson used for his estimate of the excess cost of the AGR programme was of building out a series of light water reactors, importing US technology. Underneath this kind of estimate, then, is an implicit confidence about the limited number of paths down which the future will unfold. The actual future, however, does not tend to cooperate with this kind of assumption.

Just two years after Henderson’s paper, the global landscape for civil nuclear power dramatically changed. In 1979 a pressurised water reactor (a type of light water reactor) at Three Mile Island, in the USA, suffered a major loss of coolant accident. No-one was killed, but the unit was put permanently out of commission, and the clean-up costs have been estimated at about $1 billion. A much more serious accident happened in 1986, in Chernobyl, Ukraine, then in the Soviet Union. There was a loss of control in a reactor of a fundamentally different design to light water reactors, an RBMK, which led to an explosion and fire, which dispersed a substantial fraction of the radioactive core into the atmosphere. This resulted in 28 immediate deaths and a cloud of radioactive contamination which extended across the Soviet Union into Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, with measurable effects in the UK. I’ll discuss in the next post the features of these reactor designs that leave them vulnerable to these kind of accidents. These accidents led both to a significant loss of public trust in nuclear power, and a worldwide slowdown in the building of new nuclear power plants.

Despite Three Mile Island, having given up on the AGR programme, the UK government decided in 1980 to build a 1.2 GW pressurised water reactor of US design at Sizewell, in Suffolk. This came on line in 1995, after a three year public inquiry and an eight year building period, and at a price of £2 billion in 1987 prices. Henderson’s calculation of the cost of his counterfactual, where instead of building AGRs the UK had built light water reactors, was based on an estimate for the cost of light water reactors £132 per kW at 1973 prices, on which basis he would have expected Sizewell B to cost around £800m in 1987 prices. Nuclear cost and time overruns are not limited to AGRs!

Sizewell B was a first of a kind reactor, so one would expect subsequent reactors built to the same design to reduce in price, as supply chains were built up, skills were developed, and “learning by doing” effects took hold. But Sizewell B was also a last of a kind – no further reactors were built in the UK until Hinkley Point C, which is still under construction

The alternative to any kind of civil nuclear programme would be to further expand fossil fuel power generation – especially coal. It’s worth stressing here that there is a fundamental difference between the economics of generating electricity through fossil fuels and nuclear. In the case of nuclear power, there are very high capital costs (which include provision for decommissioning at the end of life), but the ongoing cost of running the plants and supplying nuclear fuel is relatively small. In contrast, fossil fuel power plants have lower initial capital costs, but a much higher exposure to the cost of fuel.

Henderson was writing at a time when the UK’s electricity supply was dominated by coal, which accounted for around three quarters of generation, with oil making a further significant contribution. The mid-seventies were a time of energy crisis, with seemingly inexorable rises in the cost of all fossil fuels. The biggest jump was in oil prices following the 1973 embargo, but the real price of coal was also on a seemingly inexorable rising trajectory. In these circumstances, the growth of nuclear power in some form seemed irrestistible.

Economics is not all that matters for energy policy – politics often takes precedence. Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1980, determined to control the power of the unions – and in particular, the National Union of Mineworkers. After her re-election in 1983, the run-down of UK coal mining led to the bitter events of the 1984-85 miners’ strike. Despite the fact that coal fired power plants still accounted for around 70% of generating capacity, the effects of the miners’ strike were mitigated by a conscious policy of stock-piling coal prior to the dispute, more generation from oil-fired power stations, and a significant ramp up in output from nuclear power plants. Thatcher was enthusiastic about nuclear power – as Dieter Helm writes, “Nuclear power, held a fascination for her: as a scientist, for its technical achievements; as an advocate for a strong defence policy; and, as an opponent of the miners, in the form of an insurance policy”. She anticipated a string of new pressurised water reactors to follow Sizewell B.

But Thatcher’s nuclear ambitions were in effect thwarted by her own Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson. Lawson’s enthusiasm for privatisation, and his conviction that energy was just another commodity, whose efficient supply was most effectively guaranteed by the private sector operating through market mechanisms, coincided with a period when fossil fuel prices were steadily falling. Going into the 1990’s, the combination of newly abundant North Sea gas and efficient combined cycle gas turbines launched the so-called “dash for gas”; in this decade natural gas’s share of electricity generation capacity had risen from 1.3% to nearly 30% in 2000. Low fossil fuel prices together with high interest rates made any new nuclear power generation look completely uneconomic.

Two new worries – the return of the energy security issue, and the growing salience of climate change

Two things changed this situation, leading policy makers to reconsider the case for nuclear power. Firstly, as was inevitable, the North Sea gas bonanza didn’t last for ever. UK gas production peaked in 2001, and by 2004 the UK was a net importer. Nonetheless, a worldwide gas market was opening up, due to a combination of the development of intercontinental pipelines (especially from Russia), and an expanding market in liquified natural gas carried by tanker from huge fields in, for example, the Middle East. But for a long time policy-makers were relaxed about this growing import dependency – the view was that “the world is awash with natural gas”. It was only the gas price spike, that begun in 2021 and was intensified by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that made energy security an urgent issue again.

More immediately, there was a growing recognition of the importance of climate change. The UK ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2002, committing itself to binding reductions in the production of greenhouse gases. The UK’s Chief Scientific Advisor at the time, Sir David King, was particularly vocal in raising the profile of Climate Change. The UK’s rapid transition from coal to gas was helpful in reducing. overall emissions, but towards the end of the decade the role of nuclear energy was revisited, with a decision in principle to support nuclear new build in a 2008 White Paper.

We’re now 16 years on from that decision in principle to return to nuclear power, but the UK has still not completed a single new nuclear power reactor – a pair is under construction at Hinkley Point. I’ll return to the UK’s ill-starred nuclear new build program and its future prospects in my third post. But, next, I want to go back to the original decision to choose advanced gas cooled reactors. This has recently been revisited & analysed by Thomas Kelsey in When Missions Fail: Lessons in “High Technology” from post-war Britain
https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2023-12/BSG-WP–2023-056-When-Missions-Fail.pdf. His key lesson is that the decision making process was led by state engineers and technical experts. In my next post, I’ll discuss how design choices are influenced both by the constraints imposed by the physics of nuclear reactions, and by the history that underpinned a particular technological trajectory. In the UK’s case, that history was dominated – to a degree that was probably not publicly apparent at the time – by the UK’s decision to develop an independent nuclear weapons programme, and the huge resources that were devoted to that enterprise.

All things begin & end on Albion’s Rocky Druid shore

I’m 63 now, so the idea that I should still be taking part in “adventure sports” is perhaps a little ridiculous. Nonetheless, rock climbing has been so much part of my life for so long that I still try and get out, generally for easy short climbs on the gritstone cliffs near my home in Derbyshire. There are things that I’ve done in my younger days that I have put behind me without much regret – I won’t be climbing frozen waterfalls in New England again, or winter climbing in the Lakes or Scotland. I do miss snowy mountains a bit, though I know I will never be a serious alpinist. But there’s one variety of cllmbing that I think is very special, that I look back on with real pleasure, and that I think maybe I should try to involve myself in once again, even if at a much lower level than before. That is rock climbing on Britain’s sea-cliffs, a branch of the pastime with its own unique atmosphere and set of demands.

I started rock climbing seriously when I was 14 or so; at that time it was my family’s habit to spend every summer in St Davids, Pembrokeshire, near where my mother had grown up. The coastline of Pembrokeshire is spectacular – a succession of coves, headlands, and cliffs, pounded by the open Atlantic waves. At the time, the idea of climbing the cliffs of Pembrokeshire was in its infancy. Rock climbing on the granite cliffs of Cornwall was well-established, and the counter-cultural climbing scene of North Wales had created hard and serious routes on the sea-cliffs of Gogarth, on Anglesea. But what little climbing on the cliffs of Pembrokeshire was recorded in a slim guidebook by Colin Mortlock, published in 1974, not by the Climbers Club or any of the establishment sources of climbing information, but by a local publishing house more associated with postcards and wildlife guides than rock climbing.

The first ever guidebook to climbing in Pembrokeshire, by Colin Mortlock. Just 150 pages long (the current guidebook runs to 5 volumes), it often failed in the basic function of telling one where the routes go (and, in one or two cases, even where the cliffs actually are), but was a source of great inspiration. The cover photograph is of Colin Mortlock himself climbing “Red Wall” at Porthclais.

My imagination was seized by the cover of this book, showing Mortlock himself powering up a sheer, apparently overhanging, wall above a boiling sea. The route was called “Red Wall”, and was graded “severe” – that was the kind of climbing I wanted to do. In 1977 I persuaded my school friend and climbing partner Mark Miller to come and stay with my family in Pembrokeshire so we could give this sea-cliff climbing business a try.

Mark and I were, by that time, reasonably confident climbers up to grades of severe, with some level of basic competence at rope work and protection, and in possession of the basic gear – ropes, harnesses, the nuts and slings that were state of the art at the time. We studied the guidebook and looked at the picture. It looked steep – but surely, if it were that overhanging, the holds must be good. We’d done routes like that on the gritstone cliffs of Derbyshire, we thought – tough routes for the grade, but within our grasp.

But we’d misjudged it. The cover picture turned out to wildly tilted; it’s an off-vertical slab, maybe 70 degrees or so, blessed with perfect sharp, incut finger holds. We romped up it. Severe? It would barely be V. Diff in the Peak District! But it remains one of my favourite routes – I’ve probably done it twenty times since then. Few routes capture so completely the joy of sea-cliff climbing at its friendliest, with easy access to the base of the route, clear blue water sloshing gently below one’s feet, lichen and rock samphire on beautiful pink rock, footholds and handholds in all the right places.

Mark and I got better and more experienced at climbing. By the time we left school I was a confident leader of climbs VS in grade, tentatively trying things that were a bit harder. Mark had by force of will converted himself into an extreme leader, with a specialism in bold, protection-less slabs. In the summer before I went to University, in 1980, we persuaded a relatively new friend, Peter Carter, to come with us to Cornwall and Devon. Or, more accurately, we persuaded Peter to take us there – recently discharged from the Royal Marines, he had the unique asset of owning, and knowing how to drive, a small van.

Our trip started at the very tip of Cornwall – on the granite cliffs of West Penwith. We did some fine climbs on the traditional cliffs of solid granite, like Bosigran and Chair Ladder. But it was on the return trip that our sea-cliff horizons were truly expanded. A bleak headland near the north coast village of St Agnes is known to climbers as Carn Gowla, with three hundred foot cliffs falling vertically into the deep sea.

The route we chose was a HVS called Mercury. The first problem is getting to the base of the route – the only way was to abseil. We tied two 150ft 9 mm ropes together, anchored them to a good thread in the slope above the groove, and set off down. At the bottom, a ledge about twenty feet above the waves, there’s a huge sense of commitment – the easiest way out is the route Mercury, all 270 ft of it. In the end, the technical difficulties weren’t beyond us, though the exposure, commitment, and the dubious, vegetated rock were very far from the friendly crags of the Peak District.

Another highlight of that trip was my first encounter with the spectacular scenery on the stretch of coast north from Bude to Hartland. Known as the Culm Coast, it’s composed of thinly bedded sandstones and shales that have been dramatically folded, and then sliced abruptly by the sea. Not only is it the most dramatic coastal scenery in England, it also provides a variety of great climbs, ranging from short and solid sea-washed slabs to 400 foot climbs, almost of mountain scale, on rock whose solidity is not above suspicion. I’ve returned to it again and again.

There’s something uniquely memorable, I think, about sea cliff climbs, and even decades on I vividly remember the climbs and the people I did with them with. On the Culm Coast there’s a 400 ft climb called Wrecker’s Slab. The first time I did it was with my college friend Jonathan Sharp, I think just a few months before he tragically died in the Alps. It wasn’t hard, but its scale and looseness gave it quite a reputation, well-deserved.

In Pembrokeshire, amongst the cliffs north of St Davids, Trwyn Llwyd is a fabulous buttress of solid gabbro. I did Barad with Sean Smith; its crux felt like a VS gritstone jamming crack – 200 feet directly above the sea. Craig Coetan is a much easier crag, above a little inlet which attracts curious seals. In my teenage years I explored these gentle slabs with my father.

Back in the Culm coast, the hardest route I did was with my old and much missed friend, the late Mark Miller. Blackchurch is a crag with a sinister atmosphere that entirely lives up to its name; Archtempter is one of the classics of the main cliff – a soaring groove line now graded E3. Mark did the first pitch, thin and loose, and I led the widening crack above through an overhang. At the top, we so far forgot ourselves to shake hands.

Blackchurch, North Devon. The obvious groove is the line of “Archtempter”; the (just visible) climbers are Mark Miller at the halfway stance, and above him the author, just about to enter the overhanging section. It’s not a great photo, but it does convey something of the demonic atmosphere of this crag.

Looking for new routes provides another, exploratory dimension to sea-cliff climbing; I had many memorable trips with Brian Davison, who believed that the purpose of guide books was to tell you where not to climb. In the Lleyn Peninsula, we did one of the earliest routes up Craig Dorys; we called it “Error of Judgement”. As the guidebook says: “It certainly was, an appallingly loose line”.

In North Pembrokeshire Penbwchdy is a long headland with a long run of big, vegetated cliffs. I’d been there with Jonathan Sharp but failed to get up anything – we’d scrambled down a grassy slope, done a 150 ft abseil to sea level to find our way forward was to cross a deep but narrow inlet on the remains of a wrecked ship. Not relishing the idea of balancing across on an old propeller shaft, over which waves were breaking, we went back the way we came.

The great pioneer of sea-cliff climbing, Pat Littlejohn, had a done a route at the far end of Penbwchdy, on a section of cliff he called New World Wall, accessed by a long low-tide sea level traverse after the shipwreck crossing that Jonathan and I had balked at. Done in 1974, I suspect Terranova, as the route was called, hadn’t had a lot of repeats, given the awkward approach. But Brian and I later found another way down to New World Wall, with some careful route finding and a final scramble. Brian led a new route up this, which he called “New Dawn Fades”, at E4, a good onsight lead up a steep groove.

The best new route I ever did was on the sandstone cliffs south of St Davids, a couple of miles east of Porthclais. A pamphlet describing new routes reported a new crag on the headland near Caerfai, with a HVS called “Amorican”, now a classic and often repeated route. I kicked myself – I’d walked past that crag innumerable times but never noticed its potential. But to the right of the crack of Amorican is a sweeping concave slab of sandstone, unclimbed in 1984. Climbing with Mary Rack, I found a circuitous line; a thin sloping crack demanded 20 ft of intricate and precise footwork, with only tiny holds for the hands. I called it “Uncertain Smile”.

Sea cliff climbing undoubtedly has more danger than the landward variety – loose rock, tidal conditions, big waves. One experience in Cornwall was the closest I have (knowingly) come to dying. My climbing partner was José Luis Bermudez; we were staying at the Climbers Club hut at Bosigran, where I remember being hubristically superior, as experienced climbers and successful young academics, to the party of university students we were sharing the hut with.

The next day we went to Fox Promontory, a slightly obscure granite headland on the south side of the West Penwith peninsula. We scrambled down above the March seas to a sloping platform, maybe 20 feet above the level of the sea. But freak waves do exist; I remember seeing a wall of water coming towards me, then a huge weight knocking me down and dragging me downwards across the rough granite. José had been on a higher level than me, I felt him grab me as I came to a stop a few feet above the sea. We hastened to climb out, me soaking wet, nearly hypothermic by the time we got to the top of the route, with the whole of the front of my body grazed and bloody, feeling like I had been dragged across a cheese-grater.

At some point in my 30s I realised I didn’t any more have the bottle to do big serious sea-cliff routes any more. One memorable day out with Brian Davison probably confirmed this; he had his eye on an unclimbed sea-stack close to Fishguard – Needle Rock. But to get to it we had to get to the bottom of a 200 foot cliff, also unclimbed. We abseiled as far as a 150 rope would take us. We had to descend the last 50 ft using the ropes we were going to climb with, so when we got to the gap between the cliff and the needle we had to pull them down after us. Now we had to get up the sea-stack and down again before the route back to the main cliff was cut off by the tide, and then find a new route on-sight to get back up the mainland cliff.

In the end it was fine – Brian led a good route up the sea-stack, which he named “Needless to say”. And there was a relatively straightforward route up the main cliff to be found, at about VS in grade. Brian is a superbly strong and resourceful climber; there is no-one I would trust more to get out of a sticky situation, and there really was nothing to worry about, but I could feel myself losing my cool and succumbing to anxiety and fear.

I think those routes were pretty much the last serious, extreme routes I’ve done on sea-cliffs. But sea-cliff climbing doesn’t always have to be like that. There is still joy to be had in gentle routes above quiet seas. And there is no better example of that than the route I started this piece with, Red Wall at Porthclais, still one of my favourite routes anywhere.

The gentler side of sea-cliff climbing. The author on his umpteenth ascent of Red Wall, Porthclais, near St David’s; this picture gives a much more accurate sense of the character of the route than the cover picture of the Mortlock guide!