On a construction site sitting behind the beach at Sizewell, on England’s East Anglian coast, mountains of soil make it hard to see two small, blue signs. These indicate the spots where, in the middle of the next decade, two nuclear reactors should start generating enough energy to power 6mn homes.
The extraordinary thing about the 900-acre site is not its scale but that it has an identical twin — for reasons that reveal a lot about the latest thinking on building nuclear power stations.
The new Sizewell C plant has been designed to be as close as possible a copy of Hinkley Point C, a project 280 miles away on the other side of the country. Building there started in 2016, eight years before that at Sizewell.