What may not have been immediately apparent in the coverage of the government decision was that the Planning Inspectorate, tasked with assessing such projects, had recommended that permission be refused. The problem, the investigators explained, was quite simple: EDF couldn’t say exactly where it would find one of the main substances needed to run a nuclear power plant, namely water. In addition to uranium, a reactor of the kind EDF plans to build needs water in very large volumes. Salt water will be part of the process, which is one reason why nuclear power plants are usually built next to the sea. But fresh or “potable” water will also be needed – first, to cool the two reactors, and then, just as importantly, to cool the irradiated fuel once it is removed from the reactors. For this, absolutely clean water is essential. Sizewell B uses approximately 800,000 liters of potable water per day. Sizewell C, with its twin reactors, will require more than 2 million liters per day and up to 3.5 million liters per day during construction. Last September, during the closing hearings of the six-month public planning review, the question of where the developer was going to get the water to run Sizewell C, let alone build it, became urgent. Those who had raised concerns about this very issue more than 10 years earlier would have been forgiven for being disappointed. As one of the driest parts of the country, Suffolk is described by the Environment Agency as “severely water stressed”. By 2043, eight years into Sizewell C’s 60-year life, the agency predicts a water deficit in the county of more than 7 million liters a day. Northumbrian Water, which operates locally as Essex and Suffolk Water, had made it clear to EDF that there was insufficient local groundwater for either construction or operation. EDF’s plan, therefore, was to build a pipeline to bring water from the River Waveney, 18 miles away on the Norfolk border. During at least the first two years of construction, while the pipeline was being built, EDF planned to install a temporary desalination plant at the site to convert saltwater from the sea into fresh water. Then in August, the water company broke the news that the abstraction licenses dictating how much water it could pump from the Waveney, granted by the Environment Agency, were likely to be cut by up to 60% to preserve downstream levels. He then confirmed that Waveney did not, after all, have the capacity to supply water for any of the 10-year construction phases. Desalination, opponents of the project noted, was a solution that EDF itself had discounted in January 2021 “due to concerns about energy consumption, sustainability, cost and wastewater disposal”. And yet desalination, with all the problems it has posed (including dumping millions of liters a day of saline and phosphorus concentrate into the North Sea), remains EDF’s “back-up” solution for the plant’s operation, as well as its construction, if no other source can be found. Northumbrian Water has since confirmed that: “Existing water resources (including the River Waveney) will not be sufficient to meet the projected network water demand, including the operational demand of Sizewell C.” For his part, Foreign Minister Kwasi Kwarteng has a “reasonable level of certainty” that 2 million liters of water per day will be found elsewhere by the time the reactors are ready to start up. Perhaps, as Northumbrian Water has suggested, by diverting it from Essex (although Essex is not overloaded with water). or by reducing household waste; or by reusing waste water. It will be up to the Environment Agency, the Water Regulatory Authority, Natural England and the Office for Nuclear Regulation to ensure that everything is done right once a water source – any kind of source – is settled. The more I look at these mock-ups of the construction site, the more they seem like an allegory for another kind of disaster. Given the Government’s stated intention to build a fleet of new nuclear power stations across the country, it is not just people living in Suffolk who have reason to wonder what the Secretary of State’s decision to wash his hands of the problem says about resilience. water of Sizewell C. of the systems we trust to protect our environment. However, the foundations will be laid, I suppose, and the cranes will go up, and after 10 years and £20bn (by EDF’s reckoning), Sizewell C will be built. And when the time comes for its reactors to go critical, they will there is water, because if there isn’t, Suffolk will have a new tourist attraction to rival Framlingham Castle: the most expensive white elephant in human history. What this deed means for Suffolk’s rivers and seawater, let alone the county’s landowners and farmers, are not questions that will be answered before construction begins. It is enlightening, in this context, to consider that the last six months have been the driest in Suffolk for more than a quarter of a century and the driest in England since 1976. “The Secretary of State disagrees with the review authority’s conclusions on this matter,” Wednesday’s decision letter states, “and considers that the uncertainty about the permanent water strategy is not an obstacle to granting consent for the proposed development.” During last year’s programming hearings, two stories kept coming back to me: the biblical account of Moses in the desert, who made water flow from a rock by striking it with his staff; and the story of the Brothers Grimm, where a giant clenches a stone in his fist and crushes it until finally the water is forced out. William Atkins is the author of The Immeasurable World: Journeys in Desert Places and The Moor
