Hinkley Point is the imperfect answer to a pressing problem

Brits had been told that we’d be cooking our turkeys on power generated at Hinkley Point by next Christmas. It’s clear that for those still holding on to that promise, cold lunches will be on the menu. But nonetheless the drawn-out, long-running saga of Hinkley Point should at least reach some kind of conclusion today. Or, at the very least, the end of the beginning. It seems all but certain that EDF – who hold the final piece in the puzzle for funding the project – will agree to give the go-ahead to Britain’s first new nuclear power plant in two decades at a board meeting later. The resignation of an EDF director who opposed building the Somerset power plant has removed one of the final hurdles in the way of the mammoth construction project. In his resignation letter, Gerard Magnin – who joins EDF’s chief financial officer Thomas Thornton in stepping down – described Hinkley Point as ‘very risky’.