Let’s start on a positive note. Earlier this month, the government approved the construction of our first power station based on a small modular reactor (SMR): the technology that's the immediate future of nuclear energy. Of course, in the tradition of the UK government's nuclear policy - a case study of indecision and panic - there was a snag. The chosen site was Wylfa, on Anglesey’s northern coast, site of two 1960s-era Magnox reactors.
Given the site's remote location, skilled workforce and enthusiastic local population, Wylfa may be the easiest possible place in the UK to try out a new generation of nuclear technology. But half the point of the SMR programme is to slash the capital costs and complexity of nuclear by building off-the-peg reactors and installing them near where their electricity is needed. Ideally, in a location with a Gail's bakery (I could name a couple of possible sites not far from my North London home).
As things currently stand, the Wylfa SMR looks set to become another pioneering one-off prototype, repeating much of the stop-start 70-year history of nuclear in Britain. For the reasons why the government will struggle to escape this dismal loop, see the report of the Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce, published this week.
The taskforce, appointed by the prime minister in May, uncovered a regulatory and legal framework which could have been designed to frustrate investment in nuclear infrastructure - or at least ensure it was the most expensive in the world. Examples in the report include the notorious £50 million 'fish disco' at Hinkley Point: any criticism, it stresses, should 'focus on the system' rather than regulators or the plant's developer. Elsewhere we have the over-enthusiastic application of the ALARP doctrine - the requirement for risks to be 'as low as reasonably practicable', regardless of proportionality. Then there is the risk, under the well-meaning Aarhus Convention, of crowd-funded protest groups throwing spanners into the works by challenging holes in project plans with no risk of adverse consequences. See, for example, the two years of litigation over the provision of drinking water at Sizewell C.
The taskforce, which includes a leading infrastructure planning lawyer, makes 47 recommendations - including simplifying the regulatory landscape and limiting legal challenges to nationally strategic infrastructure projects to a 'single bite of the cherry'.
All very welcome, but given our looming electricity supply crunch, will it be enough? Another paper published this week, Expediting Civil Nuclear Power in the UK, makes two interesting proposals. As the report is put out by free-market and opaquely funded thinktank Policy Exchange, you might expect it to propose a bonfire of regulators. It doesn't: author Dr Robert Craig, a University of Bristol lecturer in constitutional law, says the Office for Nuclear Regulation should maintain its hard-won international reputation for rigour.
Rather, he suggests two reforms for streamlining and cutting the costs of project approvals. One is to create a new Nuclear Appeal Tribunal which would have jurisdiction, protected by ouster clauses, in relation to all aspects of the construction of nuclear power plants.
For his other reform, Craig looks back at the private acts of parliament which enabled Victorian railway revolution. To overcome the problem of tiny groups of individuals holding projects to ransom, the Victorians relied on the central principle of the UK constitution: parliamentary sovereignty. For nuclear approvals today, Craig proposes the use of hybrid acts: legislation sponsored by a government minister but with elements of the private act procedure 'somewhat akin to a planning permission hearing'. Parliamentary legitimacy would confer protection from judicial review while keeping the UK in compliance with Aarhus Convention obligations.
The result, the author concludes, could transform the regulatory environment for the construction of civil nuclear power. In turn, this would encourage innovation from both home and abroad as electricity demand ramps up in the coming years. 'Let a thousand nuclear power plants bloom.'
In this coming nuclear golden age there would still be plenty of work for lawyers - and the lights will be on to help them do it.
Michael Cross is the Gazette's news editor. He covered civil nuclear developments in Europe, Asia and the US for several decades
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