Risky Chinese chequers in UK

For a finance minister so keen on the defence of UK national sovereignty against democratic Europeans, George Osborne’s unbridled enthusiasm for Chinese investment in the UK’s critical infrastructure is striking. If all these memoranda of understanding come to fruition, Chinese entities will hold important stakes in UK water, airports, IT infrastructure and now nuclear power generation, all without a serious national debate on any potential risks such involvement might bring.

Since the Chinese government does its homework, it knows that Osborne represents a country reduced to penury by the financial crisis and with some tricky, big-ticket items on its wishlist. Since the Chinese appreciate deference from their visitors, they must have been delighted by the chancellor. Britain is open for business, as he likes to say. Just make me an offer.

Neither China’s sovereign wealth fund nor its state-owned enterprises are philanthropic. All have large war chests, and their search for profitable, secure investments around the world has stimulated competition among aspirant recipients. But good bargains are not always done in haste, and a number of unanswered questions hang over China’s proposed investment, future majority stake-holding and possible future operational involvement in Britain’s nuclear power.

Some are hardy perennials: The world has 270,000 tonnes of high-level waste in temporary storage, an unlovely heap that grows by 10,000 tonnes each year. In 50 years of nuclear power, nobody has come up with a workable plan for the million years that safety regulations demand. Are the costs of that, and of decommissioning, built into the deal — and if so, who pays?

Then there is public subsidy: Nobody has built a nuclear power plant without it, but the mandatory opening-up of European electricity systems to competition means consumers are no longer obliged to underwrite unlimited costs, or to pay for expensive nuclear energy. This transfers the financial risk to the owners and financiers — hence the difficulty of finding the cash. What is different here?

French enthusiasm for this power source is explained by the attempt to save their industry after decades of nuclear chill: Japan’s plants are currently shuttered, for obvious reasons; new licensing is suspended in the US; many countries (Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Spain and Belgium) are phasing out nuclear power, or have never had it (Ireland, Austria, Norway, Greece, Portugal, Italy and Denmark).

But what is in it for China? China has been the global nuclear industry’s main hope of survival in recent years. It is a newcomer, starting to build its first commercial reactor only in 1985. It now has 16 in operation and a further 26 under construction, and more are planned. Now China hopes to become the world’s next big nuclear exporter and sees involvement in a British plant as a key step to gaining credibility in the market.

This is an ambitious programme, not least on the management side. Most nuclear accidents resulted from human error and today industry experts are worried by China’s weak regulatory structure and its unproven capacity to build a safe management culture at such speed. Even in China, post Fukushima, public anxiety over the nuclear programme has begun to spill out on to the streets: Earlier this year, public protests halted the construction of a waste processing plant in Guangdong that the authorities had insisted was perfectly safe.

Surely we too should be asking more questions of a chancellor who appears to think that Chinese money buys him out of the intractable difficulties and uncertain costs of nuclear power.

Will British consumers end up paying high energy prices to guarantee a Chinese investor a good return? What future leverage will Chinese investment in British infrastructure give to an emerging power that frequently says it does not accept established global rules? What degree of transparency and accountability can we, as supplicants, enforce on our new partner? What guarantee have we that in depending on Chinese finance, we haven’t surrendered more than we bargained for? Perhaps it is not too late to ask.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd

Isabel Hilton is the editor of chinadialogue.net