The rebirth of Britain’s nuclear power industry moved closer yesterday after the Government announced a list of sites for new reactors.

Each of the 11 proposed nuclear power stations, which will be built on sites from West Cumbria to the Kent coast, will cost nearly £4.5 billion and have a capacity of up to 1,600 megawatts of electricity, enough to supply two million homes for up to 60 years.

But energy experts warned that the first plant would not be operational before 2017 at the earliest, too late to plug a gap opening up in Britain’s energy supplies as ageing coal and nuclear power stations close.

The gap is likely to be filled by the rapid construction of gas-fired power stations, which are powerful and relatively quick and cheap to build.

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Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, welcomed the announcement of the 11 sites, all located at or close to existing reactors, as another important step towards a new generation of nuclear power stations.

“Nuclear power is part of the lowcarbon future,” he said. “It also has the potential to offer thousands of jobs to the UK and multimillion-pound opportunities to British businesses.”

However, Craig Lowrey, head of energy markets at EIC, an independent consultancy, said that the new plants would not help Britain to avoid a dangerous slide towards an overreliance on electricity produced from gas-fired power stations, just as domestic supplies of gas from the North Sea are running short and Britain is seeking to slash its carbon emissions.

“The UK is potentially in quite serious trouble,” he said. “We are set to lose a quarter of our current generating capacity before [the first nuclear plant is built] and it is not clear how that gap is going to be filled.”

The total generating capacity of Britain’s current fleet of power stations, including coal, gas, nuclear, hydroelectric, wind and biomass stations, is about 83,500 megawatts. Ageing nuclear plants are due to be closed. A number of coal-fired stations are also set to close by 2015 to meet new emissions rules.

Dr Lowrey said that the Government’s failure to take firm early action meant that it was now inevitable that the gap would be filled by new, easy-to-build gas-fired power stations.

However, the depletion of North Sea gas means that Britain will be forced to import more and more raw fuel from countries such as Russia, Algeria and Qatar, while consumers will be left increasingly exposed to fluctuations in the wholesale price of gas.

Official figures show that the share of Britain’s electricity produced by burning gas has risen from 2 per cent in 1992 to 35 per cent today. It is expected to rise further, with gas-fired plants under construction at Pembroke in Wales, the Isle of Grain in Kent and Langage, near Plymouth.

Dr Lowrey also gave a warning that the replacement of ageing power stations with new gas and nuclear plants and wind farms would be an enormously costly exercise that would hit consumers in the pocket.

Calling for greater state involvement in the programme, he said: “You cannot underestimate what the impact of this will be on consumers’ electricity bills.”

John Cridland, the deputy director-general of the CBI, said: “We need a national planning statement on nuclear building as soon as possible. Even now it will probably be 2017 before any nuclear stations come online. Further delay could be disastrous.”

The public now has a month to respond to the list of sites, which includes Hinkley Point in Somerset and Sizewell in Suffolk, considered the front-runners for the first two stations to be built by the French power giant EDF. The Government will then submit an approved list of sites in August.

The announcement of the nuclear sites brought protests from environmental groups, who argued that the high costs involved and the waste produced by nuclear stations would not justify the contribution they would make in cutting carbon emissions.

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