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Not everyone has lost faith in the project. “It is the construction of a house of cards.” “Why have we reached this point?” asked Magnin. He is particularly concerned about EDF’s ability to complete the project before the current deadline of 2025. “The Hinkley Point project remains very risky,” Magnin told me. In the months before the EDF board finally signed off the deal in autumn 2016, the finance director resigned, along with Magnin. But even insiders at EDF aren’t entirely happy with it. Many British observers agree that the deal is ludicrously favourable to EDF – “a dreadful deal, laughable” says Prof Steve Thomas, who works on energy policy at the University of Greenwich. He added: “We cannot be sure that in 2060 or 2065, British pensioners, who are currently at school, will not still be paying for the advancement of the nuclear industry in France.” According to Gérard Magnin, a former EDF director, the French company sees Hinkley as “a way to make the British fund the renaissance of nuclear in France”. Under this contract, British electricity consumers will pay billions over a 35-year period. To pay for it, the British government has entered into a complex financial agreement with Électricité de France (EDF), the energy giant that is 83% owned by the French government, and China General Nuclear Power Group (CGN), a state-run Chinese energy company. At present, the estimated total bill for Hinkley Point C is £20.3bn, more than twice the London Olympics. “It’s three times over cost and three times over time where it’s been built in Finland and France,” says Paul Dorfman, from the UCL Energy Institute. Some experts believe it could actually prove impossible to build. It is a new and controversial design, which has been dogged by construction problems and has yet to start functioning anywhere in the world. Some critics of the project have questioned whether Hinkley Point C’s nuclear reactor will even work. The project was first proposed almost four decades ago, and its progress has been glacial, having faced relentless opposition from politicians, academics and economists every step of the way. But to reach that stage, it will need to overcome an extraordinary tangle of financial, political and technical difficulties. When it is finally completed, Hinkley Point C will be the most expensive power station in the world. Here, on 430 acres of muddy fields scattered with towering cranes and bright yellow diggers, the first new nuclear power station in the UK since 1995 is slowly taking shape. Hinkley Point, on the Somerset coast, is the biggest building site in Europe.

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