During the summer leadership campaign Rishi Sunak was unequivocal in his backing for new nuclear power.
In his battle with Liz Truss for Tory votes he not only backed existing government plans to build up seven new plants, but said he wanted to find ways so they could be “built and scaled up much faster”.
Today, however, it has emerged that the future of the first of those new nuclear stations – Sizewell C – is now in jeopardy as part of wider government spending cuts. Treasury sources stress that the project is still “more likely than not” to go ahead. And, in part, the game at this stage in Whitehall is to “rule nothing out” in terms of tax rises and spending cuts so as not to play into the endless speculation about what may or may not be for the axe.
But nevertheless when he was chancellor Sunak was a nuclear sceptic – and far less enthusiastic than Boris Johnson about pursuing an ambitious and costly programme on nuclear renewal. And it is easy to see why, at times like these, you might think it was a good idea to axe a project that won’t be delivered for ten years when you are facing very immediate financial and dire straits.
Yet such short termism is, in part, what has left the UK so vulnerable to the consequences of the war in Ukraine in the first place. We don’t have large amounts of gas storage because the government did not want to pay to keep it operational when global energy markets were calm. And we didn’t invest in new nuclear years ago because it was seen as costly and something that could be done in the future – if a better technology didn’t turn up in the meantime.