If you eat a banana, you get a tiny dose of radiation. Perfectly safe. Yet Britain’s nuclear regulator once forced a proposed Anglesey nuclear power plant to redesign its filtration system to cut potential exposure by exactly that amount. The result? Months of paperwork and meetings to eliminate an amount of radiation smaller than what you’d get from 20 minutes on a plane. What didn’t follow was a new nuclear plant on Anglesey.

That is the absurdity strangling Britain’s nuclear ambitions. We have world-class engineers and a spotless safety record, but also a regulatory culture that prizes minimising non-existent risks over common sense.

Every government talks big on nuclear. Every time, nothing happens. Ed Miliband now promises a ‘golden age’ of nuclear. A few years ago, Boris Johnson pl

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