In defence of the Fingleton Review

Nature NGOs warn it could turn ‘a nature crisis into a catastrophe’. They’re wrong.

When John Fingleton’s review of nuclear regulation was published, I was struck by the near-universal support for it. This is a properly radical document. And given the UK’s extreme nuclear cost issues and the pressing need for clean, reliable, and secure power, anything weaker would not have sufficed.

I expected it to be controversial, yet what we saw was cross-party agreement and the only real controversy was whether or not Rachel Reeves’ endorsement at the Budget was full-throated enough. In the week that followed, the Prime Minister described the review as a model for economic reform to be applied far beyond nuclear and publicly committed to full implementation within 2 years.

The green NGOs who had fought hard (and failed) to kill key parts of the Planning and Infrastructure Act were remarkably quiet on the Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce report. That’s despite the review going much further than the Planning and Infrastructure Act. In fact, the Fingleton Review essentially sets out what the Planning and Infrastructure Act should have been. Well, the green NGOs are quiet no more.

A new briefing note from the Wildlife Trusts argues that the review is “based on flawed evidence” and “implementing the Nuclear Regulatory [Taskforce’s] recommendations would devastate nature without speeding up the nuclear planning and delivery process.” They are encouraging their millions of members to write to Ed Miliband. I am also reliably informed that MPs opposed to planning reform (and nuclear power) are organising off the back of it.

There’s just one big problem: many of the claims made by the Wildlife Trusts are inaccurate, misleading, or frankly irrelevant.

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Most of the claims relate to Hinkley Point C and how the extensive mitigations required to comply with environmental regulations did (or in their view, didn’t) drive costs. (For a full account of Hinkley Point C’s issues from fish discos to legal challenges, read this.)

Before we get to their claims, it is interesting what they don’t dispute:

• To win planning approval, EDF were required to produce over 30,000 pages of environmental documentation.

• Vital dredging works were delayed by a year due to an unsuccessful legal challenge over whether or not a permit variation to dump mud in a designated mud-dumping required an additional environmental assessment. EDF estimated this added £150m in costs.

• In fact, Hinkley Point C faced three separate legal challenges on environmental grounds. All were unsuccessful.

• EDF were also forced to pipe naturally draining water far out to sea because the water was high in Zinc.

• EDF were required to apply for planning permission for a minor change in how they stored their spent fuel, despite it having no safety or meaningful visual impacts.

Now let’s look at what their report does say and whether it adds up.

Wildlife Trusts: “A £700 million figure has been widely circulated in the press relating to fish deterrents and is quoted in the Review. This is incorrect. The cost of the fish deterrent system is £50 million.”

My assessment is that this is straightforwardly dishonest from the Wildlife Trusts. Below is the exact text from the Review.

Fingleton Review: “Hinkley Point C will have more fish protection measures than any other power station in the world. It has spent £700 million on their design and implementation, as set out in the HPC’s Development Consent Order (DCO). There will be three systems in place: Low Velocity Side Entry water intake heads (£500M), a Fish Recovery and Return System (FRR) (£150m), and an Acoustic Fish Deterrent (AFD) (£50M).”

It may be the case that some reporting around the Review has been misleading (and gave the impression the full £700m was the cost of the fish disco), but quite clearly this is not what the review says.

Wildlife Trusts: “Hinkley Point C’s original budget was £18 billion. It has since risen to an estimated £46 billion. The fish deterrent (at £50 million) comes to just 0.1% of this increased £46 billion budget. Nearly £30 billion in cost increases for Hinkley Point C have nothing to do with nature.”

Let’s put aside the fact that fish protection cost far more than £50m and that fish protection was far from the only cost of complying with environmental legislation – the 31,000 page environmental impact assessment covered far more than fish.

As I’ve argued before, it is a mistake to focus only on the direct costs of compliance. What ultimately cuts construction cost is learning-by-doing, certainty around design, and building up a supply chain – all of which are undermined by uncertain planning processes where builders don’t know how long it will take to win approval, whether they will be required to modify their design or construction plans, and there remains a risk they might be rejected outright. This, rather than the direct cost of the acoustic fish deterrent, is the real culprit.

Wildlife Trusts: “The Nuclear Regulatory Review says (for example) that just 0.08 salmon, 0.02 trout, and 6 lamprey per year would be saved. This deliberately downplays the impact on nature. This statement relies on analysis by the developer EDF, who captured fish and put trackers on them and used old data from Hinkley B power station. Since then, a more thorough analysis has been completed for the Environment Agency, who have found that 4.6 million adult fish per year being killed is a more accurate number, or 182 million fish in total over sixty years. These fish populations are a foundation stone for the wider ecosystem of the Severn Estuary, supporting internationally important migratory bird populations and other species. Many of the fish are rare or endangered. Damage on the scale suggested by the Environment Agency figures could have calamitous impacts on that ecosystem and the economic and social activities that rely on it.”

The implication is that the disparity is because the taskforce trusted the developer’s numbers while other more trustworthy numbers were available. This is misleading.

When it comes to biodiversity, not all fish are equally valuable. The Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce’s analysis only focused on the fish granted special protection by the Habitats Regulations, not the total of all fish (including much more common fish) affected. This is why there is such a large disparity.

It is true that EDF’s estimate of impacts were smaller than the Environment Agency’s figures. EDF’s data suggested that 0.75 million fish would be killed. This amounts to 0.003% of fish in the Bristol channel approach. Even if you multiply it by 8 to reach the EA figure, you are still left with a very small percentage. (And remember, this is the impact of a structure capable of powering millions of homes without releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.)

It is also important to contextualise these figures.

First, 4.6 million fish sounds like a lot. But the impact of Hinkley Point C is small compared to the impact of commercial fishing. The forty-four tonnes (EA numbers) of marine life crushed each year by Hinkley Point C’s cooling system is a tiny fraction of the 745,000 tonnes of fish caught each year by the UK’s fishing fleet. In fact, Hinkley Point C’s impact is on par with that of a single small fishing vessel.

Second, they are not predictions, but reasonable worst-case scenarios. This is what the ‘precautionary’ Habitats Regulations require. Differences between numbers also depend on methods of calculating ‘equivalent adult fish’. In reality, far more than 4.6m fish will be killed each year, many will however be extremely young, small and would not have made it to adulthood.

Wildlife Trusts: “The Review also refers to the Bat Conservation Trust as an example of how to spend money on nature far more effectively, saying that they received £180,000 from the green recovery fund for horseshoe bat habitats. This is incorrect; the Bat Conservation Trust has not received any money from the green recovery fund for this purpose, nor did the Trust carry out the referenced project.”

This is quite a serious charge. Did the Nuclear Taskforce invent a £180,000 bat conservation project to prove a point?

No, but they did attribute it to the wrong organisation. Following the citation in the Review does take you to the Bat Conservation Trust website where a £180,000 grant was used to repair and upgrade a barn that became the site of a large colony of horseshoe bats. However, while the Bat Conservation Trust gave it an award, the actual upgrades (measures to exclude owls and improve temperatures) were carried out by the Vincent Wildlife Trust.

(I do find it strange that the Wildlife Trusts’ researcher asked the BCT, but didn’t follow the hyperlinked citation in the report.)

The core point still stands. It is possible to spend money on bats far more effectively than building a £120m bat tunnel. Funnily enough, the Wildlife Trusts report suggests that this £120m expenditure wasn’t required and could have been avoided. This, to me, feels unlikely as a recent explanation from HS2 ltd’s top ecologist points out: there were no cheaper ways to comply with the law (and any route change would have increased environmental impact.)

The above are the big errors, but the issues don’t end there.

On a number of occasions, they rely on soft dogwhistle tactics.

Nuclear is described as a ‘potentially risky technology’. Clearly, they are trying to tap into radiophobia and fears about Chernobyl style-disasters. Chernobyl, by the way, was the result of a reactor design that lacked a containment dome – Hinkley Point C’s containment is built to withstand a 1 in 10,000 year earthquake and direct hit from a jumbo jet - and the decision to run it in extremely unsafe ways. (For more detail, I recommend this paper from Prof Gerry Thomas, who ran the Chernobyl Tissue Bank at Imperial College London until recently.)

No form of energy generation is without risk, but nuclear stands out as the lowest-risk. Our World In Data reviewed multiple studies and found that nuclear power is one of the safest ways there is to generate power. Only solar is safer, but that doesn’t account for casualties as a result of mining the rare earths used in renewables.

EDF is described as a ‘company owned overseas’. As if that invalidates their arguments or makes them commenting on public policy in Britain (a country where they employ over 12,000 people) suspect.

Then there’s also a tendency to make arguments that frankly don’t stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny. Here are some examples.

Wildlife Trusts: “The combination of these changes would not only substantially weaken protections for nature but would also introduce significant uncertainty in the nuclear sector and for other sectors about whether standards and regulations that are bedding in and increasingly becoming well understood are in fact about to change.”

Clearly, the nuclear sector disagrees having welcomed the Fingleton Review so strongly. By the way, have you noticed people never call for stability when they don’t like the status quo.

They make the same argument for the National Landscapes duty.

Wildlife Trusts: “The duty created by the Levelling Up & Regeneration Act 2023 on Local Authorities relating to National Parks and Landscapes is already providing much needed clarity on what the duties are for those who need to comply. Now that the new duty has been used on the ground several times, its application is becoming well-understood. Suggestions of changing or removing it, not long after its introduction, will introduce uncertainty and delay, as well as weakening National Park and National Landscape protections.”

This is not, I would point out, the position of any planning lawyer I have spoken to. The duty has already been used as grounds to mount multiple legal challenges. This has led to long-drawn disputes over compensation and I’ve been told first hand by anti-pylon MPs that they will attempt to block major grid upgrades.

Then there’s this sleight of hand.

Wildlife Trusts: “The Office for Environmental Protection previously reviewed the effectiveness of environmental assessment regimes… In its review it found that the majority of project applicants and planning authorities already find HRA to be clear and well understood, and it applies to an existing, extensive and ecologically important network of sites.”

This sounds as if developers actually support the regulatory status quo. However, the survey itself wasn’t a developer survey, but an opt-in survey (N = 123) of ecologists and environmental practitioners distributed by membership groups. No wonder they were in favour.

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Let’s remember what’s at stake. Nuclear power is the greenest form of power there is. Not only does it generate zero carbon emissions in operation, it is also the most land-dense form of electricity generation. To produce the same amount of power as Hinkley Point C would require a solar farm the size of the Isle of Wight. And that’s before you get into the need for backup generation and new transmission upgrades.

If we are to tackle the biggest driver of nature loss (climate change) then nuclear must play a role. But nuclear’s role is limited by its cost. Yet the high costs paid in Britain are not inevitable. France, Finland, and South Korea all build plants for much less. Britain could bring costs down, but not when rules and regulations undermine long-term investments in supply chains and push up costs. Rules and regulations that even the NGOs concede have not prevented a ‘nature crisis’. That’s why the Fingleton Review is so important (and why it has seen such strong support). It explains clearly what’s needed to bring those costs down.

If the Government delivers the plan in full, then it will be transformative. But, they must hold their nerve in the face of organised opposition and misinformation from green groups.