By Kennedy Maize
“Europe’s biggest nuclear power operator EDF, which manages France’s fleet of 57 reactors, is under pressure to show it can improve on its record of reactor construction. Recent projects have been severely delayed and hugely over budget, taking well over 10 years to complete.” – Financial Times, February 20, 2026).
There’s a new leader in the nuclear power plant cost overrun derby, and it isn’t even in the clubhouse yet. Britain’s Hinkley Point C — being built in Somerset by France’s government-owned Électricité de France (EDF) — is now going to cost at least £49 billion ($65 billion) if it goes into service in 2030 and another £1 billion ($1.3 billion) if the first unit is delayed to 2031. This equates to $10 million per megawatt–best case–with multiple years of waiting. Expect it to go up from here.
The two-unit, 3,200-MW French-designed European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) was announced in 2015 at a then-estimated price of £18 billion in 2015 pounds sterling. Construction began in 2016. The new cost estimate — which EDF purposely underplayed — came in a company news release last month of its 2025 financial performance. Buried deep in the release, EDF said of the project:
Schedule for the start of production by Unit 1 adjusted to 2030 and action plans for the electromechanical work; completion cost estimated at £35 bn (in 2015 sterling).
Of course, the plant won’t be paid for in 2015 currency, but in contemporary pounds (or dollars). The new estimate “compares with a previous ‘best case’ target of 2029, itself a two-year delay from an earlier timetable,” the Financial Times (FT) reported. “When the project was given the go-ahead in 2016, it was due to come online in 2025.”
FT added that EDF, “Europe’s biggest nuclear power operator, which manages France’s fleet of 57 reactors, is under pressure to show it can improve on its record of reactor construction. Recent projects have been severely delayed and hugely over budget, taking well over 10 years to complete.”
The EPR, originally designed by France’s Framatome, a joint venture of EDF (80.5%) and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (19.5%), has had a troubled history. In Finland, work on the 1,600-MW Olkiluoto 3 began in 2005 by France’s Areva and German Siemens A for Finnish operator TVO, scheduled to go into service in 2009 at an estimated cost of €3 billion.
The project experienced a cascade of problems, many of them embedded in the design. The plant went into commercial service in 2023 at an estimated cost of €11 billion ($12 billion), at the time the most expensive single nuclear unit in history. The plant has operated well.
EDF’s Lost Luster
France itself has had a problematic adventure with the EPR. EDF’s Flamanville 3 EPR in France began construction in 2007 with an estimated date for full 1,600-MW of power in 2012. The plant reached full power in December. Commercial operation is expected this year. When that happens, Flamanville 3 will become the first French power reactor to come online in 23 years.
The project faced a series of technical hurdles. NuclearNewswire reported last December:
Originally estimated to cost €3.3 billion (about $3.9 billion), the project’s price has ballooned over the course of repeated delays and difficulties. In December 2022, EDF announced a new cost estimate of €13.2 billion ($15.5 billion). In January 2025, the French Court of Auditors released a new estimate that includes the interest accrued during construction: €23.7 billion (about $27.8 billion). In all, the project is set to enter commercial operation at a price tag anywhere from four to seven times its original budget.
Race for the Worst
The most expensive commercially operating reactors are Georgia Power’s two new units at its four-unit Vogtle site. Units 3 and 4 are two Westinghouse 1,000-MW advanced reactors. Construction began in 2009, with an estimated completion estimated at 2016 and 2017 at a cost of $14 billion combined. Unit 3 went into service in 2023 and Unit 4 in 2024, at a total cost of $36.8 billion, around 160 percent above budget, not to mention the time-value of money.
Could Hinkley Point lose its position in the cost overrun race? Watch out for Britain’s Sizewell C near the village of Suffolk. This EDF project calls for two — that’s right — 1,600-MW EPR reactors. It’s a Hinkley Point clone. Construction began in January 2024, while the financing packing was still being constructed. The planned operating date is 2035, although that depends on progress at Hinkley Point, which has priority.
The current estimated cost for Sizewell C is £38 billion ($50.6 billion). Don’t hold your breath on that. It could easily be the most expensive thermal generating plant ever built, eclipsing the Vogtle #3/#4 debacle.
In short, the “nuclear renaissance” is lacking a model for success going into its eighth decade. George W. Bush, Joe Biden, Donald Trump–the saga continues with the most regulated, most subsidized industry in the world.
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This is an edited and slightly expanded version of this post published by Kennedy Maize at Quad Report. A Washington, D.C.-based journalist, Maize has covered energy and environmental topics for more than 40 years.
Why are Nuclear Reactors Round instead of Square?
Because they’re forced to cut corners to build them around the opposition schedule.
😆 😄
Methinks you have resorted to a roundabout way of criticizing nuclear power plant construction methods.
I painfully agree.
The famous phrase, “In France we don’t have oil, but we have ideas,” could be changed to: “In France we don’t have oil; we have natural gas that we don’t extract from the ground, and if we ever do have a good idea, we’ll find a socialist to wreck it.” (One may recall Jospin for shutting down Superphénix to satisfy the Greens.)
At least they don’t have one million lawyers with agendas like in the US.
Now show how fast China builds them and how many by year.
Lots of nukes but no costs:
https://nypost.com/2026/03/11/opinion/dont-buy-green-china-hype-heres-beijings-real-energy-agenda/
South Korea has built 13 nuclear reactors since 1996 at an average construction time of of 4.5 years, the more recent ones have been quicker than that.
Almost a tenth of the price too.
Performance contracts.
Construction coasts do not go down if every project is a one off never to be repeated. The difference between the solar panels and bird chopping eco-crucifixes you and your friends want us to rely on is that these reactors will be producing energy day and night for the next 60 years.
Sizewell C is near the village of Sizewell in the county of Suffolk.
Except for apparently always coming in late, all these reactors are still cheaper than Somali day care in Minnesota, and fast (heehee) democrat California trains to nowhere. Just think, if it weren’t for democrat govt-sponsered fraud, we in the USA could have had two more $13 billion Ford Class Nuclear Aircraft Carriers built, and thrown in a few B21 Raiders, and F47s. And still have money left over to build several Nuclear Reactors; over budget at that!
Thank goodness they have the even worse value for money £100+billion railway from London to Birmingham to hide behind.
“Design flaws” is a term to be avoided – especially with an experienced designer. Sounds like the designers have been infiltrated by ideology and bureaucracy – always a bad combo in the engineering trade.
This is what happens when you design to suit the regulator. The EPR is a very large, over-designed reactor. Its features essentially fulfill a wish list of what government bureaucrats want without much consideration on how much it will cost to build. There was no realistic cost/benefit analysis done here.
This is why the costs keep escalating during construction. It looks very bad in terms of cost and schedule. Nevertheless, there will be payback. This is a very robust design built for high availability and increased efficiency over the currently running fleet of nuclear reactors. This reactor will most likely run for 80 years or more (unless the Brits become as stupid as the Germans). Considering how long the UK managed to keep its Generation 1 Magnox reactors running, I think that their engineers will be able to get that kind of performance out of Hinkley Point C, if the politicians will let them. The French, who are building the reactor, have a good record of running them. France has a lower cost of electricity than both the UK and Germany.
The EPR was intended to cover the sum total regulatory requirements of all potential European markets so that nuclear regulators in any one European country could quickly approve the design, and with few additional design changes.
EPR: The Reactor That Tried to Please Everyone and Left Nobody Satisfied. (Decouple blog, January 15th, 2026)
It didn’t work out that way. For example, England’s regulators imposed something like 7,000 design changes on the baseline EPR configuration, doing so while the reactors were under construction.
The argument has been made that none of England’s many design changes added anything of safety performance value to what was already a needlessly bloated reactor design.
Ontario has started to build small modular reactors (SMRs) in Darlington, each of which ‘would provide 300 megawatts of power’. According to Ontario Power Generation (OPG) the “estimated construction cost of the initial reactor is $7.7 billion, which includes $1.6 billion of infrastructure to be shared across the project…[and it is] the first of four such reactors that OPG aims to build on the site, at a total project cost of $20.9 billion”. That is in Canukastany dollars for 4 SMRs, but they don’t actually provide completion dates, so…
I drive by the site regularly, on my way east from Toronto, and can see that it is humming (while housing construction in Toronto slows). So who wants to bet the farm that these SMRs can be completed on budget, or when these Hitachi based SMRs are up and running?
Don’t get me wrong, I support OPG building these SMRs, but, you know…
I have worked with several French EPC contractors over the years. Planning and forethought are not their strong suite. They would constantly try to send half0baked designs out to the field for construction at which point they would either want a change order to fix their incomplete/faulty design and/or generate a massive construction change order because following the engineering design painted the constructor into a corner.
How far back were you working with French EPC’s? For what kinds of projects?
It’s a big problem for Europe in that their industrial construction capabilities have declined as a direct consequence of the continent-wide de-industrialization process which has been going on for the last two decades and more.
From the late’80s to the late ’90s. Large infrastructure projects (port expansions, pipelines, refinery expansions) and multiple oil and gas production projects both onshore and offshore in the Arabian gulf. It was bad then, I imagine even worse now.
My understanding is that Great Britain and France have never really gotten along all that well throughout history.
Perhaps the builder of Britain’s Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant is better titled as France’s government-owned Électricité de
France (EDF)Vichy (EDV)./sarc