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‘Poor old Walter Marshall,” someone cuttingly remarked of the one-time stalwart of Britain’s nuclear power industry shortly after he died in 1996. “All he ever wanted to do was glow in the dark.”

Fortunately for us all, there has never been a major “glow in the dark” incident during Britain’s 70-year engagement with nuclear energy. But we did once come perilously close.

Were it not for the insistence by the government’s then-chief nuclear scientist that air filters be fitted to Britain’s first nuclear power station – Calder Hall, constructed on the site of what is today known as Sellafield – the fire that broke out in a uranium pile in the autumn of 1957 might have rendered the entire Lake District and surrounding area uninhabitable.

On the whole, the UK’S safety record has been relatively good. There has been no Chernobyl, Fukushima or Three Mile Island here.

Sadly, the same success cannot be applied to the industry’s commercial viability, which has instead been marked by repeated disappointments, wildly overoptimistic forecasts, technological culs-de-sac, catastrophically poor project management and extreme cost overruns. Britain once led the world on nuclear energy, but shamefully squandered its advantage.

Hinkley Point C, under construction on the Somerset coast, is the latest chapter in this catalogue of failure. When first given the go-ahead in 2010, the plant was expected to be operational by 2017, but is still at least five years off completion. Meanwhile, construction costs just keep on growing. Last month, the French energy giant EDF increased the completion costs by

£7 billion to

£32.7 billion, making it probably the most expensive power plant to have been built in the world. Completion is also expected to be delayed by another 15 months, to September 2028. Consumers will eventually pay an equally high price: to persuade operators to build, the Government had to agree a minimum price of £89.50 per MWH, inflation-proofed for 35 years – some of the most costly bulk electricity ever produced.

In his swansong as prime minister, Boris Johnson committed to building a further eight plants at the rate of one a year. It made his blood boil, he said, that the country which was first to split the atom had so few nuclear power stations. “Have we lost the gumption and dynamism of our parents and grandparents?” he asked. In Britain at least, the dream of nuclear power has always been a triumph of hope over experience.

But for two relatively recent concerns that have come leaping up the political agenda – global warming and energy security – the very idea of a new nuclear build would by now be defunct.

Climate change has given the industry a new lease of life. To compensate for the intermittent nature of renewables, the grid will always need some form of always-on, baseload capacity.

Without major breakthroughs in energy storage, there is no alternative to nuclear if net-zero targets are to be met.

Putin’s war has exposed the perils of British reliance on natural gas. But after decades of neglect, it’s not clear if Britain still has the wherewithal to provide a credible, homegrown nuclear power industry. As in so many other industries, are we doomed to rely on expensively bought-in foreign designs and expertise to meet our future needs?

In this month’s budget, Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor, announced the “Great British Nuclear” initiative to identify sites for the new generation of reactors and to galvanise their design and funding. Yet, rather than opting for a British-made solution, the Government has indicated that there will be an international competition for the sites, including “small modular reactor” (SMR) designs from American and Japan among others. It is a bitter blow to homegrown hopefuls looking to the government to help regenerate British leadership in nuclear power.

In its early days, nuclear power was essentially a by-product of the dash to create nuclear weapons. Britain may have been first to split the atom, but the US was first with the bomb. Denied access to America’s weaponry, Britain had to strike out on its own.

To do this, it first needed to produce its own nuclear fuels. As explained by Simon Taylor, author of The Fall and Rise of Nuclear Power in Britain: “While the urgent priority was to create material for weapons, the government was keenly aware that the heat from nuclear fission could be used to generate electricity.”

Britain was not the first country to produce electricity from atomic energy, but when Calder Hall was opened on Oct 17 1956, it was undeniably the first nuclear plant to generate electricity at scale. Some 28 similarly designed Magnox reactors were eventually built. But they were expensive and never competitive on price with coal or even oil.

Britain’s next stab at nuclear power was justified on the basis of an expected shortage of coal. The new stations were also meant to showcase British technological expertise around the world, providing a major export opportunity. But in the event, there was no shortage of coal, and now stripped of the captive markets of the Empire, the export potential failed to materialise. Not a single example of Britain’s next generation nuclear technology – the advanced gas-cooled reactor (AGR) – was sold abroad.

“Among a certain generation of people, Dungeness B [the first AGR station] is still a byword for failure of construction, design and project management on a heroic scale,” says Taylor. A later historian of Britain’s privatised electricity industry described it as “the single most disastrous engineering project ever undertaken in Britain”.

Nuclear’s future may have seemed doomed, but the dream of a nuclear energy-powered economy was not dead. Margaret Thatcher was an early convert to the perils of man-made climate change, though according to her energy secretary at the time, David (now Lord) Howell, her support of nuclear power was more to do with the power of Arthur Scargill’s National Union of Mineworkers. This time, the programme was to be based on the foreign-designed, off-the-peg technology of the American firm Westinghouse’s pressurised water reactor. The original plan for nine such stations would have left Britain nuclear-dominated in electricity generation. “Had we built them,” says Lord Howell today, “we wouldn’t have had the problem of rocketing electricity prices seen as a result of Putin’s war. We’d have been much better placed to withstand the energy price shock.”

Only Sizewell B was completed, broadly on budget, albeit 16 years after the initial go-ahead. Almost a decade was spent in planning hearings and public inquiries. Yet in the end, it wasn’t the Byzantine nature of British planning constraints that did for the plan, but the discovery of North Sea oil and gas. Chernobyl in April 1986 sealed the deal. Public opinion turned against nuclear, which appeared ruinously expensive and dangerous to boot.

It might have ended there, were it not for climate change. With the North Sea reserves already in decline, leaving Britain worryingly dependent on potentially hostile regimes places for its energy, nuclear’s time came again. But it was not to be based on British technology. Nor was there to be any public money. Instead, in 2010, the Government turned to the French energy giant, EDF, to run Britain’s legacy power stations and to build new ones. Keeping nuclear off the public balance sheet has required a bizarre series of contortions, including, when EDF effectively ran out of money, bringing the Chinese state-controlled China General Nuclear (CGN) on board to plug the funding gap at Hinkley and the mooted Sizewell C. In return, CGN was promised that it would be allowed to build its own, Chinese designed power station at Bradwell in Essex. But the mooted alliance soon fell victim to the souring of Western relations with China. Where that leaves Britain’s nuclear power ambitions is unclear – stuck due to Treasury concern over costs and bureaucratic Whitehall indecision seems to be the sum of it. According to Daragh Coleman, climate change author and activist, it is going to require the equivalent of 19 new Hinkley Points to meet the Government’s decarbonising goals, assuming storage fails to solve the problem of renewables’ intermittency. But beyond Sizewell C, the Government’s new nuclear plans are no more than a list of grandiose, Johnsonian aspirations.

Yet there is hope for homegrown solutions. Championing them is Rolls-royce, which already engineers the reactors that power Britain’s nuclear submarines.

With almost a quarter of a billion pounds of government-funded development capital, it has been scrambling to adapt SMR technology for civilian use. The Rollsroyce pitch is that designated sites be used instead for multiple, factory produced SMRS. Prefabricating reactors offsite will deliver substantial economies of scale, says Tom Samson, chief executive of Rolls-royce SMR. There is extensive international competition, with some 50 to 60 SMR designs thought to be currently under development or ready for deployment. The Rolls-royce proposition is promising, but requires the UK Government to commit and there is little chance of securing private capital or winning export orders until it does. “It’s chicken and egg,” says Kwasi Kwarteng, the former business secretary. “No foreign country is going to allow itself to be used as the guinea pig. They’ll want to see it working in the UK first.”

For Kwarteng, it would be madness not to give Rolls-royce its chance, given the government money already provided. Yet persuading the powers that be is an uphill struggle. One Whitehall source says: “If we give up on Sizewell C and instead go for SMRS, we are taking a big risk with the future of UK generating capacity.” Sizewell is the bird in the hand, against Rolls-royce’s two in the bush. Yet if EDF’S nuclear leviathans are indeed yesterday’s tech, to deny Rolls-royce its chance would be shortsighted, strangling a potentially world-leading sovereign technology at birth. Sometimes it’s worth taking the risk. Despite nuclear power’s chequered UK history, this may be one of them.

‘Have we lost the gumption and dynamism of our parents and grandparents?’

‘If we give up on Sizewell C, we are taking a big risk with the future of generating capacity’