Blair angered environmentalists with a speech Tuesday to business leaders in which he called for a new generation of British nuclear power plants in order to ensure both reliable energy supplies and combat global warming.

However, The Guardian newspaper and the Financial Times said the concern within the government is more to do with costs than safety issues.

Cabinet sources quoted by The Guardian newspaper said the Treasury produced "eye-wateringly large" estimates for the cabinet, and they expected Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown to study the costs in the next two months.

Brown told BBC television meanwhile he agreed "absolutely" with Blair's call for replacing Britain's ageing nuclear power plants. "This will be a government decision, a government policy and it will be announced very soon," he said.

Ministerial skeptics wanted detailed figures on the costs of decommissioning existing as well as new stations, and they also want figures on the capital costs for construction and disposal of waste, according to The Guardian.

The cabinet sources told the Guardian that it was uncertain what the Department of Trade and Industry meant when it said there will be no taxpayers' subsidy to encourage the private sector to build the new plants.

The sources said they "believe the government will be forced to make guarantees, soft loans, or rig the market in a way that crowds out the case for renewables," such as wind, water or solar power.

The Financial Times reported that Blair wants a new generation of nuclear power plants to provide at least a fifth of Britain's power generation needs, with the help of private investment.

Blair will support building the plants on sites occupied by existing reactors, which will accelerate construction, it said.

However, it added that there were questions about whether the private sector will want to shoulder the cost without economic incentives.

Industry experts at KPMG, it said, estimated that just maintaining nuclear's 19 percent share in supplying Britain's energy needs would require building 10 powerful 1,000 megawatt reactors by 2020, at a cost of about 15 billion pounds (22 billion euros, 28.2 billion dollars).

The estimate for disposing nuclear waste carries a 70 billion pound bill, it added.

Related Links