Between 1956 and 1971, Britain built 26 nuclear reactors. By 1965, it had built more nuclear plants than the US, USSR, and France combined. Today, Hinkley Point C will be the most expensive nuclear power station ever built, anywhere, and Britain hasn't completed a reactor since 1995. worksinprogress.co/issue/how… What the hell happened? Many explain the decline of British nuclear power by pointing to particular misfortunes: a bad bet on a flawed reactor design (the AGR), Three Mile Island, or Chernobyl. But the real explanation is the abuse of technocratic authority and public trust. In the early decades, Britain's nuclear engineers operated with a degree of latitude that would be almost unthinkable today. The Atomic Energy Authority enjoyed immunity from civil liability and most regulation. To build reactors, the Central Electricity Authority would briefly study possible sites, announce its choice The London Gazette and the local press, and notify any landowner or leaseholder. Any objections would be heard at local inquiries that usually lasted less than a week, after which construction could start. But the technocrats used this freedom badly: • The tender for Dungeness B in 1965 went to moribund company that had submitted a token bid with no expectation of winning, that went bust four years into the project. • The reactor came online 13 years late and four times over budget. • Officials and engineers refused to take public concerns about nuclear waste seriously. Britain tried dumping nuclear waste in the Forest of Dean in the 1950s and dumped it at sea for decades until Greenpeace publicized the practice in 1978. • The Central Electricity Generating Board secretly subsidized nuclear with revenue from coal and oil plants for years. Eventually, the industry lost its privileges. The Trawsfynydd planning inquiry of 1958 ran to fifty pages; Hinkley Point C's environmental assessment alone runs to forty-four thousand. The Nuclear Installations Inspectorate had thirteen inspectors in 1959; its successor has more than four hundred. Where regulators once deferred to the engineers, they now demand revisions on an almost unimaginable scale — some seven thousand design changes at Hinkley Point C, producing a reactor with a third more steel and a quarter more concrete than its counterparts in China, France, or Finland. Every nuclear programme that has worked – Britain's, France's, or China's today — has four things in common: clear political backing, regulators with reason to approve, predictable demand, and a public willing to go along. Between 1965 and 1995, Britain lost all four. New at Works in Progress, @chalmermagne on how Britain forgot how to build cheap, clean nuclear power. worksinprogress.co/issue/how…