EDF Energy has re-iterated its claims that nuclear energy will be a lasting force for good in the West, as the new nuclear reactor takes shape. Martin Hesp reports from Hinkley Point.

Europe’s biggest civil engineering project is beginning to growl, grind and grunt – even though full planning permission has yet to be granted for two proposed pressurised water reactors at Hinkley Point.

Bulldozers are busy out on the Somerset coast as engineers make initial preparations to build the giant new power station which designers claim could provide electricity to five million homes.

When – and if – the scheme gets into full gear, the building project will be even bigger than the work going into the London 2012 Olympics.

“Hinkley Point C will be the biggest construction site in Europe,” said a spokesman who took us around the site.

“The main earthworks will require the excavation of 4.2million tonnes of earth – the equivalent of four Wembley Arenas.

“The volume of re-used fill material will be as big as the Great Pyramid of Giza. The volume of the seawall will be as big as the Arc de Triomphe and the 150,000 tonnes of reinforcement will be the equivalent to 22 Eiffel Towers.”

Added to this, the project will consume more concrete than the Empire State Building – more steel than Sydney Harbour Bridge.

But we go back to that one word – if. The staggering scale of this whole vast scheme will only come to fruition if EDF Energy eventually gets a full-blown green light to build Hinkley Point C.

You occasionally hear the word “if” being mentioned by the engineers, but any shades of doubt do seem to vaporise when you actually see what is already going on across the vast intended site to the west of the existing power station.

And at the moment these are “remedial” works – and such words are important to engineers and planners.

“What we’re seeing here is just remedial work,” explained one of the EDF minders assigned to take us around the low undulating ex-fields which rise from the fossil-filled but largely unvisited beaches of the West Somerset littoral.

Outline planning permission has been granted for the “preparatory” work – as long as EDF Energy brings the site to the required state of readiness, which is the reason for “remedial” work.

Much of the site was used decades ago by the people who built the now decommissioned Hinkley Point A reactors. “Things were different then,” said our minder. “When they finished the work a lot of the stuff was simply bulldozed into the ground.”

So asbestos and goodness knows what else was ploughed into the soil.

We also saw extensive man-made badger houses in a corner of the site and a partially completed traditional barn which will replace one that has to be demolished and which may occasionally have housed bats.

When the preliminary works start in earnest 500 people – most from Somerset – will be employed on site.

If the whole caboodle gets the go-ahead there will be no fewer than 5,600 people working here during the main construction period.

And a permanent workforce of 900 will be required during Hinkley Point C’s operational life of 60 years. The company claims such statistics equate to an economic boost to the region of £100 million per year during construction – then £40 million annually during its operation.

But full planning permission is not on the agenda yet – among the many considerations is the official inquiry into whether Japan’s nuclear crisis holds lessons for the safety of Britain’s nuclear industry. The report, which is being compiled by the chief nuclear inspector, Dr Mike Weightman, includes a focus on the UK’s existing reactors and the programme to build new ones.

There are plenty of protesters who hope Dr Weightman’s findings could help scotch EDF Energy’s plans – but talk to engineers at Hinkley and they are confident that the great majority of their plans which existed before the tsunami would have coped with the disastrous set of circumstances that struck Fukushima.

However, this article is not about the pros and cons: we went to Hinkley Point for a basic overview – first to tour the existing B Station in order to gain an insight into how the place is run, and then to visit the site of the proposed C Station and hear about plans from the engineers in charge.

We met B-Station director Mike Harrison, donned all manner of safety clothes, hats, goggles, etc, and marched toward the huge stack that houses two advanced gas reactors that have been operating for 35 years. The station’s lifespan is due to end in 2016, but engineers hope they can expand beyond that.

B-Station has 550 permanent staff and it produces electricity for one million homes.

“We’ve made the decision to reduce the output to approximately 75 per cent of its capacity – down from its capacity of 600 megawatts to 400,” said Mr Harrison.

There are two main things you bring away from a visit to a nuclear reactor like Hinkley-B – one is how old-fashioned a lot of it looks, the other is how obsessed this industry is with safety.

Everywhere you go, you will be shown back-up systems.

Then back-ups of back-up systems. Then back-ups of those. And so on.

Mr Harrison claims that some 80 per cent of the kit in any British nuclear power station is there as back-up.

“The three core principles are ‘diversity’ –which means an alternative way of doing something; ‘redundancy’ – so instead of relying on just one thing we can rely on one, two, three and four; and ‘separation’ which means putting the different protective plant in different areas.”

In Japan it seems the tsunami destroyed sources of emergency power leaving the reactor core to overheat. At Hinkley-B we were shown four massive energy creating turbines similar to huge jet engines – each capable of powering a small town – and told any one of these could generate enough power to operate the systems. Added to these there were diesel powered pumps, batteries and other emergency elements that support operators.

“We’ve got four principles (in an emergency): one – making sure we can shut it down, the control rods, the hold down systems; second is making sure we take the decayed heat away – that’s keeping the gas circulation and natural circulation maintained; then it’s taking the heat away which is your cooling systems etc, boilers and son; and then making sure it’s all contained in the concrete block.”

It was to the top of this concrete block that we climbed – after passing through numerous security gates and monitors. Mr Harrison took me to stand on the very top of the working reactor – we could feel the great power of the place vibrating under our feet and he showed me on his monitor how the radiation count around us was at a very reassuring zero.

Over at the new Hinckley-C site construction director Nigel Cann talked through the EDF plans by showing us an artist’s impression of the new style reactors with their signature domed roofs – and at one point in his technical explanations he used the words: “I’ve shown you this because that part of the design is nothing like what they have in Japan…”

I asked him if he was saying his proposed new plant would not have suffered similar problems in a similar catastrophe.

“We’re going to make absolutely sure we don’t,” he retorted. “We were right at the point of finalising our design and we’ve stepped back from that waiting for lessons learned to come out of Fukushima – and also to wait for Mike Weightman’s report to be published so we can take on board any recommendations. But we are confident that this is a very robust design.

Mr Cann told me that the new site would have not one but two large sea walls capable of withstanding a tsunami.

Asked if he could predict a switch-on date he was more cautious.

“At the moment we are working through a set of milestones,” he said. “But we are not the first of a kind – there are lots of lessons to be learned from other projects around the world.

“I can’t promise an end date – we can only go on previous history. We have published 2018 as being the date.

After I’d turned my recording machine off, I put it to the collected EDF staff that they must have been worried that the Japanese disaster would have implications on their plans and future profits.

They seemed genuinely askance: “I can promise you that no one here had any such thoughts,” said one of them. “We have always been confident in what we’ve planned.”

You cannot visit Hinkley Point without coming away with the very firm impression that the people who work there have every confidence in the work they do, with the equipment they use and with the giant plans they have in mind. The statistics might be awesome, the generation capacity almost frightening – but for better or worse these people believe in every atom of what they’re doing.