Keir Starmer goes nuclear in the hunt for long-term growth

There is a constant beeping sound as we are led through the building.

A sign on the wall marks the “Toxic Release Assembly Point,” another sign with arrows is marked the “Criticality Run.”

I am at the UK National Nuclear Laboratory in Preston in Lancashire, so you would expect the security and safety protocols to be rigorous.

The prime minister and the Energy Secretary Ed Miliband are here too.

The nuclear scientists I talk to are full of enthusiasm and passion; a sense they are researching a future of carbon-free energy with a transformational capacity.

They are doing exciting work on potential cancer treatments too.

But critics fret about safety, cost and nuclear waste – it is a sector with sceptics to convince after the disasters at Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986 and Fukushima in Japan in 2011.

And we have been here before – promises made about a nuclear future that fail to materialise: The timeframes of nuclear projects are much longer than parliamentary cycles and governments with small majorities can be put off by controversy.

Will it really be any different this time around – and should it be?

Sir Keir Starmer expresses his irritation that the UK’s nuclear capacity has shrivelled, despite its world-beating start.

Calder Hall in Cumbria was the first nuclear power station in the world to produce electricity for domestic use when it opened in 1956.

Twenty-one reactors were built in the UK in the ten years after that.

But the last nuclear plant to open was 30 years ago: Sizewell B in Suffolk.

And when it did, protesters locked themselves to its gates.

And already, three decades on, the opponents are sharpening their arguments.

“It doesn’t have a 100% record of safety in the UK. The nuclear industry is working amongst the most deadly materials known to mankind,” Richard Outram from Nuclear Free Local Authorities told us.

Central to the prime minister’s diagnosis of the country’s wider economic malaise is an argument grounded in our collective failure to get stuff built.

He argues that the checks and balances of our democracy, such as impact assessments and judicial reviews, have taken on so many layers that they end up gumming up the likelihood of getting anything signed off.

In other words, so the argument goes, there is a collective in-built bias towards doing nothing.

Liberalising the rules around nuclear power stations in England and Wales is the latest case study in trying to turn that around.

The idea is these so-called small modular reactors could be sited in a far wider range of places than current or past nuclear power stations.

For instance, they have all been located on the coast, because of the volume of water required nearby for cooling.

The new generation of power stations would still need water but much less of it: A nearby river or lake would suffice.

Ministers are also going to make it easier for them to get planning consent too.

That means it is less likely those arguing against such a plant being built down the road from them would be able to stop it.

The government, as one senior figure put it to me, is trying to “squeeze what we can out of our majority.”

Contentious, even unpopular stuff will likely clear the Commons, even with a cohort of Labour grumblers.

Incidentally, while the Liberal Democrats argue the focus right now should be on renewable energy, both Reform UK and the Conservatives back the government’s approach.

There is an otherworldly element to nuclear power.

Many of us can relate to oil and gas: Filling up the car, putting a pan on the hob.

But being handed a drinks can with the label “if nuclear energy powered your entire life – the fuel would fit inside this” is mind bending.

And then there is the safety stuff again.

It is telling that when the government tries to go out of its way to address these concerns, in so doing it tacitly acknowledges how deep the concerns of some go.

The notes they sent us before the prime minister’s visit set out that “nuclear plants are designed with multiple layers of safety measures including making them robust enough to withstand a direct aircraft impact.”

Ministers hope the first of these new nuclear power stations could be keeping your lights on by 2032.

So they are far from an instant panacea for our economic woes.

But the government appears determined to have long-term horizons while simultaneously attempting to project a spirit of economic dynamism, when the economy itself is anything but.

The question now is if this time new nuclear power plants do actually get built.