The big Net Zero announcement in yesterday’s UK Spending Review was to press ahead with a new nuclear power station, Sizewell C, committing £14.2bn to the project. In addition, £2.3bn was earmarked for the development of small modular reactors (SMRs). So, is the Government going all in for the atom? And should it?

All this nuclear talk took me back 25 or so years to my first ever paid Sustainability job – an eco-design research project co-sponsored by British Nuclear Fuels plc (BNFL). In a moment of candour, a senior BNFL employee told me “the only reason why we have a civil nuclear power industry is to make the nuclear deterrent more palatable to the public.” That’s some marmalade-dropper.

I’m not ideologically opposed to nuclear power, in fact I think it is great that our ageing fleet of nuclear plants is delivering 16% of the UK’s power. But can they deliver more? And, if so, when? Only one nuclear power station, Sizewell B, has opened in the UK since the end of the Cold War (which may chime with the views of my BNFL confident, or could be due to the 1990s ‘dash for gas’ – or both). A second plant, at Hinkley Point, is under construction, but is running way behind schedule and way over budget.

The standard response is “we need to use every weapon in the arsenal”, but there is always an opportunity cost. It emerged after the Chancellor’s speech that the SMR funding has been half-inched from GB Energy’s £8.3bn budget. The question is whether that funding would have been better spent on installing renewable energy today (which is GB Energy’s primary purpose) rather than betting on an as yet unproven technology which may or may not deliver low carbon energy some unspecified time in the future? And how far would the £14bn earmarked for Sizewell go in upgrading the electricity grid, training installers of heat pumps and/or installing bike lanes in cities?

This matters. To keep climate change under control, we not only have to hit our carbon targets, but minimise the ‘area under the curve’ as we get there (due to the cumulative nature of greenhouse gases). Cutting carbon today will much more effective at curbing climate impacts than any technological golden bullet turning up in 25 years’ time to save the day.

My wider fear is that the Government is being distracted from pursuing cheap renewables by vested interests. There is an unlikely coalition of right wing commentators and left wing union leaders urging the Government to pursue technologies such as SMRs, hydrogen and carbon, capture and storage (the last of which also got additional funding yesterday). For some reason, backing such unproven and relatively expensive technologies is deemed ‘sensible’, when there are cheap, proven solutions right in front of our eyes.

In the climate battle, long term thinking shouldn’t be allowed to curtail short term action. If we can do both, then great, but the balance between nuclear and other low carbon investment in the Chancellor’s speech felt more than a little lopsided.