Not actually seeing that the UK government has much of a choice about it - Their existing generating infrastructure is a mess, with far too much of it reaching the end of its design life because deregulation turned out to mean "Take the money and run" - A heck of a lot of the money that should have been spent building replacement plant wound up in shareholder pockets instead, so now the UK needs to add tens of gigawatts of capacity in <10 years. Integrating that much renewable power into an already shaky grid in a hurry is just not going to happen, coal and gas are even more politically unacceptable than nukes.. If anything, I am wondering why they are not trying to negotiate a bulk discount. -8 reactors is not really enough. Not if they want to close any of the older coal plants and cut down on the gas imports.