Kwasi Kwarteng, the business secretary tipped to become her chancellor, said last week that the government should “break more nuclear plants”. He has overseen the Future Nuclear Fund to entice developers to invest billions and told The Telegraph in April: “There is a world where we have six or seven sites in the UK.” But Simon Clarke, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, who is tipped to be business secretary in a Truss government, warned in a letter to Johnson, leaked to a Sunday newspaper, that the cost of Sizewell C could have serious financial consequences. He said the £20bn bill was “enough to have a meaningful impact on spending and fiscal choices for a new government, especially in the context of wider pressures on public finances”. In an article in the Mail on Sunday, Mr Johnson sought to frame the debate, saying the government would be able to deliver not only a “massive” support package for struggling families, but also a huge expansion of renewable energy . He wrote that “next month – if you take it from me – the government will announce another huge financial support package” after the “colossal amounts of taxpayers’ money” already pledged to help people with their bills. “We are ending our dependence on Russian hydrocarbons. In June, for the first time in decades, we did not import fuel from Russia. The UK has already increased domestic gas production – 26 per cent more this year than last year,” he wrote. “With every new wind farm we build offshore, with every new nuclear project we approve, we strengthen our strategic position. We become less vulnerable to the vagaries of the global gas price and less vulnerable to pressure from Vladimir Putin. “It is this government that has reversed decades of apathy and given the green light for new nuclear power plants. We will build one new reactor every year and have 50 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030.”
