Indeed. This government has made it absolutely clear that its Prime Directive is handing public money to cronies and party donors. So this fits perfectly.
And these are not small reactors, and there's nothing "mini" about them. They're comparable in power output to the first generation of UK reactors which operated from the 50s/60s to the 90s/00s.
It’s 6000 jobs, generating electricity without producing carbon, sustaining an industry and construction and manufacturing know how, and creation of a product for export. These seem like worthwhile pursuits to me and a good use of public funds.
Absolute numbers of jobs without a number of years aren’t useful (most of those may be transient), and they especially aren’t useful when not compared to the job creation impact of other expenditures of those same dollars.
Giving a grant to an existing company with a long history of technical excellence and delivering products to build a new product and a factory for it means jobs that don’t go away. A power plant built creates jobs to run it for as long as it exists.
On the other hand All construction jobs are not permanent - they finish building the project and have to move on to the next one, if it is the factory for the power plants, the power plant itself, the next power plant, or something else.
18 million pounds is a lot of money, but it’s a pittance compared to what tech companies are raising from VCs. In relation to the size of tech companies and the size of investments in them, 6000 jobs and the kick start to an industry for 18 million pounds seems like a bargain to me.
And these are not small reactors, and there's nothing "mini" about them. They're comparable in power output to the first generation of UK reactors which operated from the 50s/60s to the 90s/00s.