Qualla: Wylfa Newydd nuclear power station

Wylfa Newydd nuclear power station: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Huw P, CC BY-SA 4.0. Two billion pounds. That is what the developers spent over a decade on a power station that was never built. Wylfa Newydd — 'New Wylfa' in Welsh — was to be a two-reactor, 2,700 megawatt nuclear plant on the north coast of Anglesey, adjacent to the old Magnox station that closed in 2015. It would have been the second new nuclear project in Britain in a generation, the centrepiece of a Hitachi-led plan to replace the country's ageing reactor fleet. Then, in September 2020, Hitachi walked away. The site is now owned by the UK government, the nuclear ambitions for it have changed three times in five years, and a small group of local campaigners in Llangefni who never wanted the project at all are still, technically, winning.

Image: Huw P | CC BY-SA 4.0

Wylfa Newydd nuclear power station: The Eight Sites

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Huw P, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 2008, the UK government decided that the country's ageing nuclear fleet — most of it built in the 1960s and 1970s, all of it scheduled to close by the end of the 2030s — should be replaced by a new generation of reactors, built on or beside the existing sites. In 2010 it publi...

Image: Huw P | CC BY-SA 4.0

Wylfa Newydd nuclear power station: Three Reactor Designs, One Site

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Huw P, CC BY-SA 4.0. Choosing what to build at Wylfa was its own decade-long argument. Horizon first signed an Early Work Agreement with the French firm Areva to study its EPR design (the same design that has been built at Hinkley Point C in Somerset). It also commissioned Westinghouse to study its A...

Image: Huw P | CC BY-SA 4.0

Wylfa Newydd nuclear power station: Funding and Failure

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Huw P, CC BY-SA 4.0. Approval of the reactor design was not the same as approval to build it. The remaining question — and ultimately the one that killed the project — was money. The Contract for Difference financing model that had funded Hinkley Point C left the developer carrying the construction r...

Image: Huw P | CC BY-SA 4.0

Wylfa Newydd nuclear power station: Who Was Against It

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Huw P, CC BY-SA 4.0. Wylfa Newydd was opposed from the start by a local campaign called PAWB — People Against Wylfa-B, with the helpful Welsh pun that 'pawb' itself means 'everyone'. Their arguments were the standard ones of British nuclear opposition: the money would be better spent on renewables; t...

Image: Huw P | CC BY-SA 4.0

Wylfa Newydd nuclear power station: What Happened Next

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Huw P, CC BY-SA 4.0. The strange afterlife of Wylfa Newydd has been more politically interesting than its decade of pre-construction. In November 2020 a US consortium led by Bechtel, with Southern Company and Westinghouse, opened talks about reviving the site with AP1000 reactors. In January 2021, Sh...

Image: Huw P | CC BY-SA 4.0