Messy Fusion

At the turn of the 20th century, British shipyards launched something close to eighty percent of worldwide shipping tonnage.1 Yards like John Brown, Swan Hunter, and Harland & Wolff supplied much of the world’s merchant fleet. In 2023, Britain built zero commercial ships.1 Britain’s nuclear story follows the same pattern. By 1965 Britain had more operating reactors than the United States, the Soviet Union, and France combined.2 It had, more or less, helped create the nuclear power industry. Today its flagship project is Hinkley Point C: the most expensive power plant ever built, roughly six times the cost of an equivalent Korean reactor,2 thirteen-plus years into construction before delivering a single watt. So how did Britain manage to fumble this multi-generational industrial engineering bag? The easy answer is that Britain made bad technical choices and then got stuck with them: the wrong reactor, the wrong production model. But wrong choices are survivable when the system around…