Hinton: The Nuclear Retreat

The industry’s experience of government intervention in their planning over the years prior to the establishment of the National Economic Development Council, had been a far from happy one. They themselves recognised from experience the difficulty of forecasting the pattern and growth in demand: they had substantially under-estimated their sales growth and had fallen behind in building the generating plant and mains to meet it. Government intervention — in controlling their capital budgets, or influencing their choice of fuel for power stations — seemed in retrospect to have made matters worse in most respects save the decision to use more oil. They therefore viewed the prospect of increasing government involvement in planning with some wariness, though they were pleased that it seemed to be accompanied by a far more positive approach to investment in growth — with electric power leading that investment — than had been manifested earlier. The ambivalence of the industry’s feelings about government planning was nowhere more evident than in the CEGB, which had for five years been trying to come to terms with the problems posed for the management of power generation by earlier nuclear decisions.