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Hitachi to Cease Work on Nuclear Power Plant in North Wales

An archaeological dig at the site for a nuclear power plant Hitachi has been developing on Anglesey Island. The island had been expecting the project to provide 850 permanent jobs before Hitachi decided to shut it down.Credit...Francesca Jones for The New York Times

Hitachi said on Thursday that it was suspending work on a 15 billion pound, or $19.3 billion, nuclear power project in North Wales after failing to agree on financial terms with the British and Japanese governments.

“The decision was made from the viewpoint of Hitachi’s economic rationality as a private enterprise,” the company, based in Japan, said.

Ben Russell, a spokesman for Hitachi’s British venture, Horizon Nuclear Power, said that discussions with the governments would continue but that its staff, currently around 300 people, would be cut to “a minimal handful.”

Hitachi will also stop planning work on a second project, in Oldbury, England. The company said it planned to take a write-off of 300 billion yen, or $2.75 billion, on the projects.

The decision by Hitachi is a blow to the British government, which is betting heavily on nuclear installations to help meet the country’s electric power needs in the coming decades.

The big question is whether Hitachi’s move will be a death knell for Britain’s campaign to build nuclear plants, which so far has resulted in only one project under construction.

While there are signs that the government is rethinking its energy policy, it was willing to go a long way toward trying to keep Hitachi on board.

In a statement to Parliament on Thursday, Greg Clark, the secretary of state for business and energy, said the government had been willing to consider providing one-third of the equity financing for the project and to take on all of the construction debt. When Hitachi continued to balk, Mr. Clark said, “I was not prepared to ask the taxpayer to take on a larger share.”

The Hitachi plant would have been a big boost for the struggling local economy in North Wales, providing up to 850 permanent jobs.

Anglesey Island, where the plant, called Wylfa Newydd, was to be built, will most likely feel the harshest impact. Llinos Medi, leader of the Anglesey Council, the local government authority on the island, said in a statement that she was concerned about the suspension’s “immediate impact on local men and women whose employment is at risk as a consequence of this suspension.”

For Hitachi, though, the announcement could mark the end of a long and expensive saga. The company acquired the Horizon sites from two German utilities in 2012 for £697 million, or about $900 million, and wound up spending around £2 billion in total on design approvals, staff and other matters. It has been hiring apprentices, who have been training at a technical college on the island and going to Spain and Japan for work experience. At times in recent months more than 100 archaeologists were on the site, excavating and recording ancient structures that the construction would have destroyed.

Hitachi hoped Britain would prove to be an international showcase for its reactor designs. Ultimately, the company lost patience with the high level of spending required to land such a project there.

Hitachi had sought to arrive at a financial arrangement that would attract long-term investors like pension funds to the project and reduce its own exposure. But the offers of support from both the British and the Japanese sides were not enough.

In an interview on Thursday, Duncan Hawthorne, Horizon’s chief executive, said the Wales site was very attractive and had a supportive community, but that alone, he added, is not enough to attract outside investment.

Investors, Mr. Hawthorne said, were put off by the eight- to 10-year wait for a return, as well as the risks of cost overruns and other issues. With the project gaining momentum and spending rising, “it became too much for Hitachi to keep going,” he said.

Mr. Hawthorne said Hitachi would prefer to return to Britain as a supplier rather than a developer taking on large upfront risks.

In his statement, Mr. Clark said it was clear that the government needed to consider a new approach to financing large nuclear projects. He also said the government was considering supporting small nuclear reactors, including a consortium led by Rolls-Royce, the British jet engine maker.

Hitachi’s stepping back from Britain leaves France’s state-controlled EDF Group and its Chinese partner, CGN, as the only companies pursuing nuclear power projects in the country. EDF, through a British subsidiary, owns Britain’s operating nuclear power plants; with CGN, it is building Britain’s first nuclear plant since the 1990s in southwest England at a cost of £20 billion. CGN wants to build a plant in eastern England.

China now has by far the world’s largest nuclear building program, but it is largely domestic. CGN would like to use Britain as a steppingstone to an international nuclear business, though there is skepticism in Britain about relying on companies tied to Beijing for a strategically important service like electric power.

The dwindling number of companies willing to make the huge investments required to develop nuclear plants also reflects the falling costs of renewable energy sources, like solar and offshore wind.

“The economics of the energy market have changed significantly in recent years,” Mr. Clark said, with the cost of renewables trending downward and those for nuclear plants rising.

Antony Froggatt, a nuclear analyst at Chatham House, a research organization, noted that nuclear energy was costly and controversial, and that having a foreign company like Hitachi build a plant in Britain was unlikely to contribute to building a British industry.

“For all those reasons,” he said, “nuclear falls away.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: Hitachi to Cease Work On Wales Nuclear Plant. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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