By Kathryn Porter, Watt-Logic

Britain’s civil nuclear programme stands at a critical juncture. With aging AGR reactors nearing the end of their lives and delays to new projects like Hinkley Point C, the UK faces a potential capacity crunch. Yet one of the most significant obstacles to progress is not technical, it is regulatory. For decades, nuclear has been neglected, its aging reactors closing one-by-one while new projects struggle to break through the increasing web of regulatory barriers. It’s the corporate equivalent of hacking through dense jungle – there is no clear path and every last thing is trying to kill you.

On Friday, Shadow Energy Secretary, Claire Coutinho has proposed a set of amendments to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill that will slash the power of environmental regulators in the nuclear sphere. This axe needs to be swung more widely and cut down the nuclear regulator as well.

In this blog I will explain why our nuclear regulation is in such a mess and propose a way out of the jungle.

Risk elimination is not an appropriate regulatory goal

The Office for Nuclear Regulation (“ONR”) though established with the aim of ensuring public safety, has in practice fostered a culture of excessive risk aversion that now undermines the very resilience it is supposed to protect.

In relation to the dwindling fleet of legacy Advanced Gas-Cooled reactors (“AGRs”), ONR requires operator EDF to demonstrate 100% control rod insertion in a 1-in-10,000 year seismic event, which would be ten times bigger than the biggest earthquake in UK history (Dogger Bank 1931). This, despite the fact that only around 15% of rods (12 out of 80) are needed to shut down the reactor, and that two independent backup shutdown systems also exist. As a result, reactors like Torness and Heysham 2 face premature closure, not for genuine safety concerns, but due to arbitrarily conservative modelling assumptions.

0% or 100% of anything are rarely justifiable in a regulatory context because they represent absolute positions that fail to account for uncertainty, proportionality, and system trade-offs. In regulatory frameworks, particularly those dealing with energy, environment, or safety, absolutist thresholds are typically flawed for a number of key reasons:

1. They disregard diminishing returns: achieving the final few percent of any target often becomes exponentially more expensive or difficult than earlier progress. For example, reducing emissions from a gas plant by 95% might be economically and technically feasible, but squeezing out the final 5% may require disproportionate effort or cost, especially if it risks grid stability
2. They exclude pragmatic flexibility: real-world systems need buffers, contingencies, and redundancies. For instance, a “100% renewable electricity system” may sound desirable, but it ignores the need for firm backup, inertia, voltage support, and security-of-supply under stress conditions. That last 1–2% of reliability may require synchronous machines or fossil backup unless much more mature alternatives emerge
3. They ignore systemic interdependencies: energy systems operate across sectors, timeframes, and infrastructures. “0 nuclear risk” is unattainable without rejecting nuclear outright, which could worsen climate outcomes or grid resilience
4. They limit adaptive governance: rigid targets undermine the ability of regulators to respond to changing technology, market signals, or geopolitical events (eg energy security crises). Regulation must retain optionality with the ability to pivot as information or circumstances evolve. Absolutes tend to lock systems into brittle positions
5. They often signal ideology, not evidence: extreme targets are frequently the result of political or activist pressure, rather than engineering, economic, or risk-based analysis. Good regulation is risk-proportional and designed to reduce rather than eliminate harm (which is often impossible or counterproductive)

Effective regulation is about optimisation, not perfection. It weighs costs, benefits, trade-offs and uncertainties. Targets like “0% this” or “100% that” are rhetorically powerful but usually analytically weak. The goal should be a resilient, cost-effective system, not a purist one.

Of course, I am not arguing for less safety, but for a mature approach to safety and risk. A focus on component failure is inappropriate in a world where user error is increasingly a driving factor in accidents. Or where users operate in an environment that makes error more likely.

At Fukushima for example, regulators were blinkered, focusing on seismic risk while largely ignoring the well documented risks of tsunami. The ONR’s approach to graphite cracking may make it feel better: it is clamping down on a known risk, but it is excessive and this type of rigid thinking may lead it to miss other, potentially more pertinent risks. I have advocated for the inclusion of risk experts from the financial sector to join nuclear regulatory taskforces because they can help to break down this type of siloed thinking.

“In the Japanese nuclear industry, there has been a focus on seismic safety to the exclusion of other possible risks. Bureaucratic and professional stovepiping made nuclear officials unwilling to take advice from experts outside of the field. Those nuclear professionals also may have failed to effectively utilize local knowledge. And, perhaps most importantly, many believed that a severe accident was simply impossible.

In the final analysis, the Fukushima accident does not reveal a previously unknown fatal flaw associated with nuclear power. Rather, it underscores the importance of periodically reevaluating plant safety in light of dynamic external threats and of evolving best practices, as well as the need for an effective regulator to oversee this process,”
– James M. Acton and Mark Hibbs, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Risk management must also be proportionate. There have only been three major accidents (and only one of which involving fatalities) in over 18,500 cumulative reactor-years of commercial nuclear power operation in 36 countries. The evidence from over six decades of civil nuclear deployment is that nuclear power is safe, and the risk of accidents in nuclear plants is low and declining.

A 2009 US Department of Energy Human Performance Handbook notes:

“The aviation industry, medical industry, commercial nuclear power industry, US Navy, DOE and its contractors, and other high-risk, technologically complex organizations have adopted human performance principles, concepts, and practices to consciously reduce human error and bolster controls in order to reduce accidents and events… About 80% of all events are attributed to human error. In some industries, this number is closer to 90%. Roughly 20% of events involve equipment failures.

When the 80% human error is broken down further, it reveals that the majority of errors associated with events stem from latent organizational weaknesses (perpetrated by humans in the past that lie dormant in the system), whereas about 30% are caused by the individual worker touching the equipment and systems in the facility. Clearly, focusing efforts on reducing human error will reduce the likelihood of events.”

The evidence of these regulatory blinkers in the nuclear sector is also evident in relation to new reactors.

At Hinkley Point C, UK regulators (the ONR and others) imposed over 7,000 design changes on a design already approved by both the French and Finnish regulators which are hardly known for a cavalier approach to safety. Among the most costly was ONR’s insistence on a redundant analogue control system, justified as protection against cybersecurity threats and rare, high-consequence events. This requirement forced a complete redesign of the control room and rerouting of extensive additional cabling.

However, these risks are already substantially mitigated in modern nuclear control systems because they are air-gapped, use hard-wired I/O rather than remote interfaces, have redundant, diverse power supplies and run on hardened, validated platforms like Teleperm XS. ONR’s real concern appears to have been with black swan scenarios such as electromagnetic pulse (“EMP”) attacks arising from military conflict rather than routine operational hazards. But if the UK were under EMP attack, we would likely face far greater problems than control system failure at a nuclear plant: hostile forces targeting our reactors would probably also be targeting cities. At that point, worrying about analogue backups might be the least of our concerns.

Another flaw in the modern approach to nuclear safety lies in the application of ALARP (“as low as reasonably practicable”) and ALARA (“as low as reasonably achievable”). When applied to new reactor designs, these principles are interpreted by regulators to mean that worker radiation exposure must be lower than in existing reactors. This sounds sensible until you consider that even in older plants, like the AGRs, radiation exposure inside the controlled areas is lower than natural background levels outside the plant, including from cosmic rays. If workers receive a higher dose walking across the car park than they do inside the reactor building, what purpose is served by driving exposure even lower? The answer is: none. It adds cost and engineering complexity with no health benefit.

This is a distortion of the original ALARP /ALARA principles which were intended to guide practical, risk-informed decision-making, not enforce ever-decreasing thresholds regardless of actual risk. This misapplication has gone unchallenged for too long.

We need a new approach to nuclear regulation

One of the issues with the ONR (and indeed many other regulators) is lack of accountability. ONR actually sits within the Department for Work and Pensions (“DWP”), a historic decision partly due to the DWP’s association with workplace safety, and partly to reduce the risk of undue pressure from energy ministers whose enthusiasm for new reactors could in theory lead to an erosion of safety standards. But the result has been a lack of oversight. No pensions minister has the slightest interest in nuclear safety beyond thinking regulation is a good thing. They have other priorities.

I’m not usually a fan of abolishing regulators. Typically this is little more than a re-branding exercise as new regulator is formed employing broadly the same people as the old one. However in this case I would make an exception: abolish the ONR and create a new nuclear regulator, within the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (which should be re-named as the Department for Energy – let’s stop trying to virtue signal with departmental names), and staff it with different people.

Crucially, the new regulator should have a board comprising risk experts from finance and aviation as well as nuclear safety to avoid the pitfalls into which the ONR has fallen. Risk professionals from the financial sector who routinely balance probabilistic outcomes, tail risks, and interdependencies would help correct the current regulatory tunnel vision. The new regulator should be mandated to take a full-system approach to risk, factoring in wider issues such as energy security in its decision-making, so that premature closure of safe reactors on spurious grounds (such as graphite cracking) does not increase the chances of blackouts which, as we saw in Iberia, can be fatal. Energy poverty carries similar risks. Just as the Bank of England has a remit to weigh multiple economic indicators, the UK’s nuclear safety regime must operate within a wider framework of energy system integrity and national resilience.

Environmental regulation must be pruned

From bat tunnels to fish discos, environmental regulation has become pretty bonkers, going to extreme lengths to achieve minimal gains. The fact that such ridiculous solutions have been proposed in the first place highlights everything that is wrong with environmental regulation in the UK.

People are more important. This should be obvious. People are more important than bats, fish, newts and any other creature you could think of. People need secure, affordable housing, they need secure and affordable energy and they need fast and convenient transportation. Trains in fact are far more environmentally sustainable than cars, so delaying a new rail link for spurious environmental reasons is an overall dis-benefit to the environment even if a few bats suffer – and I have nothing against bats – my childhood home was shared with long-eared bats which left lots of half-eaten moths around.

In fact that’s a good reminder that most of the creatures environmentalists try to “save” cause harm to other creatures, either by eating them, or by destroying their habitats or food sources. Campaigns to prevent culling deer mean result in a decline in woodland bird numbers, campaigns to stop shooting pest birds result in higher crop damage and even harm to livestock. And of course there are endless debates about whether badgers should be culled to prevent the spread of bovine tuberculosis. Successful wildlife campaigns tend to favour cuter animals over less cute ones, which is hardly scientific.

Environmental regulators apply a bottom-up approach to regulation. They assume if they protect every site then the whole country will be protected. This is a false assumption, as is very well demonstrated by nuclear energy. Nuclear power is a very dense source of energy in the sense that a huge amount of energy is produced from a geographically small site. Very little land is required compared to other forms of generation. John Constable of the Renewable Energy Foundation has calculated that wind and solar farms use up to 3,000 times more land than nuclear to produce the same amount of energy.

So building a new nuclear power station avoids using more land elsewhere for other forms of generation. It may be the case that even if a nuclear site was an environmental wasteland (which is not the case) national biodiversity would be better than with the alternatives.

As far as nuclear projects go, environmental regulators are as troublesome as the ONR. For Sizewell C, ONR, perhaps accepting its over-reach at Hinkley, agreed to allow EDF to build an exact replica of Hinkley Point C with no additional requirements. So it is an identical design, at an almost identical site to the currently operating Sizewell B and the decommissioned Sizewell A.

Yet the project has generated some 40,000 pages of environmental statements! How? Why? They should have amounted to a couple of pages outlining any differences with the new site and the adjacent one, which are minimal. I have been there, you can spit from one site to the other.

But a combination of obsessive environmental regulators and a fear of judicial review created this tsunami of paperwork (the idea is that if you create a lot of documents you reduce the number of people who can afford to pay lawyers to read them and bring legal action). Another problem is that, according to people close to the process, many of these regulators hire environmental activists to their staff because they are willing to work for less money, creating serious biases within these organisations, as well as a potential lack of skill if hiring decisions are made based on ideology rather than technical qualifications.

The Conservative amendments to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill

To prevent some of these abuses, Lord Offord of Garvel tabled the following amendments to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill:

Exemption for new nuclear power station sites from obligations under habitats regulations

1. The Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations 2017 (S.I. 2017/1012) do not apply to the development of new nuclear power station sites.
2. Accordingly, no planning authority, statutory body, arms-length body, or court may—
   1. withhold planning permission,
   2. require mitigation or compensatory measures, or
   3. prevent or delay the grant of consent,for a new nuclear power station on the basis of any obligation, assessment, or procedure under the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations 2017
3. -specific obligations from which nuclear power station site developers are exempted under subsection (1) include, but are not limited to—
   1. wildlife mitigation measures such as bat tunnels and acoustic deterrents for fish, and similar infrastructure, whether proposed under regulatory advice or statutory process, and
   2. application of mitigation hierarchies or appropriate assessments under the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations 2017.

Member’s explanatory statement

This amendment disapplies all the provisions of the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations 2017 to the development of nuclear power stations, and so prevents planning authorities, statutory bodies, arms-length bodies, and courts from blocking development consent or imposing mitigations on the basis of those regulations.

Exemption for new nuclear power station sites from obligations under environmental impact assessments

1. Notwithstanding any requirement under the planning enactments, no planning authority or statutory body—
   1. shall be required to withhold or delay development consent for a new nuclear power station on the basis of any anticipated environmental impact;
   2. may impose mitigation conditions or design alterations to a nuclear power station solely in consequence of an environmental impact assessment.
2. Site-specific obligations which may not be required solely on the basis of an environmental impact assessment include, but are not limited to—
   1. wildlife mitigation measures such as bat tunnels and acoustic deterrents for fish, and
   2. application of mitigation hierarchies under the Infrastructure Planning (Environmental Impact Assessment) Regulations 2017 (S.I. 2017/1012).
3. For the purposes of this section, “planning enactments” means the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, the Planning Act 2004, the Planning Act 2008, the Infrastructure Planning (Environmental Impact Assessment) Regulations 2017, and this Act.

Member’s explanatory statement

This amendment gives a planning authority, including the Secretary of State, the power to grant planning consent to a nuclear power station regardless of the findings of an environmental impact assessment, and prevents planning authorities and statutory bodies from imposing mitigations or conditions on nuclear power stations based on the findings of an environmental impact assessment.

Limitation of judicial review for new nuclear power station sites

1. No court or tribunal may entertain—
   1. an application for judicial review of, or
   2. an appeal against, a decision by the Secretary of State to grant a development consent order for a nuclear power station and any associated infrastructure under the Planning Act 2008.
2. Subsection (1) includes any claim brought on the basis that—
   1. the proposed development has not complied with the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations 2017 (S.I. 2017/1012),
   2. any environmental plan, programme or delivery obligation has not been fulfilled, or
   3. any provision of the planning enactments relating to environmental protection has not been complied with.
3. Subsections (1) and (2) apply notwithstanding—
   1. any other provision or rule of domestic law (including any common law), and
   2. any interpretation of international law by the court or tribunal.
4. For the purposes of this section, “Planning Acts” means the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, the Planning Act 2004, the Planning Act 2008, the Infrastructure Planning (Environmental Impact Assessment) Regulations 2017, and this Act.

Member’s explanatory statement

This amendment prevents applications for judicial review of the Secretary of State’s decision to grant development consent for a nuclear power station, including on the grounds of non-compliance with habitat regulations or environmental protection obligations.

Together, these amendments, if passed, will limit the ability of environmental regulators and activists to delay the approval of new nuclear power stations, and reduce the cost impact of both the delays, and the often excessive design changes they require. However, I would go further, and also require whole-system thinking from environmental regulators. They should not be immune from the consequences of blackouts and fuel poverty if their actions delay the construction of important new energy infrastructure. And they should be required to assess not just local impacts but the national footprint of alternative energy sources.

Pragmatism, not paralysis is needed in our regulatory ecosystem

The UK’s pursuit of nuclear power has long been undermined by a self-imposed regulatory paralysis. The solution is not to weaken safety, but to redefine it. Safety must mean more than avoidance of accident, it must also include the ability to keep the lights on and to ensure that Britain’s critical infrastructure is robust, affordable, and secure.

We need a new nuclear regulator that is not trying to eliminate risk but to manage it. Safety standards must be reasonable and not seek to improve on the natural environment. Absolutism should be avoided, as should tunnel vision. Today’s regulation is like a requirement to force motorists to wear 57 seat-belts which any normal person would think was simply ridiculous.

Environmental regulators must not be allowed to complicate, delay or prevent new nuclear projects. These are schemes of critical national importance, and should take priority over a few newts or fish. They must approach biodiversity from the perspective of the wider national interest and not simply on a site-by-site basis, and the drive should be to reward developers for maintaining biodiversity rather than preventing them from reducing it.

And the number of people with standing to bring judicial review applications and the scope for such applications must be reduced for important national projects such as new nuclear power stations. I have argued this before and do so again. We must not allow people with an axe to grind to get in the way of critical infrastructure – it’s considered critical for a reason.

Original article   l   KeyFacts Energy Industry Directory: Watt-Logic