Lives and half-lives at C-on-Sea

They fleck the landscape here – emerging from roadside bushes, attaching themselves to stiles, clinging to village notice boards. These red, green and yellow signs look like flags you might see swaying in front of Glastonbury’s Pyramid stage. CHAOS COAST COMING SOON, they say. NUCLEAR DISASTER AHEAD. IT’S NOT TOO LATE TO STOP SIZEWELL C. Are they right?

Stop Sizewell C is the campaign name for the Theberton & Eastbridge Action Group on Sizewell (TEAGS), who were formed a decade ago during Sizewell C’s nascent consultation phase. As the group’s handiwork suggests, their main concerns are with the disruption to the surrounding area which a new plant would cause. TEAGS Ltd Executive Director Alison Downes claimed to sum up locals’ memory of Sizewell B’s construction thirty years ago in testimony given to the government’s Planning Inspectorate: ‘it was terrible, but we survived’. The much larger Sizewell C project threatens a return to these troubled years.

Nowadays Nimbyism is defended by those proudly reclaiming the term almost as much as it is used in its original form, to direct blame for the UK’s lack of ambitious modern infrastructure projects. The thought process behind it is understandable on a human level. Some people move to quiet, picturesque places because they value serenity and natural beauty. Nimbys’ detractors might accuse them of myopia and selfishness. In response may come the question: when was the last time you consented to worsen your living situation for the greater economic good of the country?

Locals such as the actor Bill Nighy and the late presenter Bill Turnbull have made public their opposition to Sizewell’s expansion plans, just as AJP Taylor, one of the twentieth century’s most important British historians, had opposed Sizewell A. This part of Suffolk promises quiet in the winter and a sunny coast in summer for the famous and the recognisable. Unfortunately for them, energy consortiums have similar taste.

The biggest milestone in Sizewell C’s development to date came last year when then-business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng granted a Development Consent Order (DCO), as required for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs). The project, part-owned by the government, is headed by NNB Generation Company (SZC), a subsidiary of EDF which also owns Hinkley Point C. The new Sizewell site would be a ‘replica’ of the European Pressure Reactor design being constructed at Hinkley, and its two reactors would collectively produce 3.2GWe – just over half of the UK’s current total nuclear capacity. It is currently seeking further investment and will announce a Final Investment Decision (essentially the final say on the matter) by 2024.

In making his decision, Kwarteng appeared to go against recommendations made by the Planning Inspectorate to pause plans until problems related to water scarcity and habitat destruction were solved. The examining authority stated,

‘unless the outstanding water supply strategy can be resolved and sufficient information provided to enable the secretary of state to carry out his obligations under the Habitats Regulations, the case for an order granting development consent for the application is not made out.’

In his decision letter, he argued that Habitats Regulations can be overridden where there are Imperative Reasons of Overriding Public Interest (IROPI) and there are ‘no feasible alternative solutions’ to the plan. A few months after the decision, with Kwarteng now chancellor, Sizewell C was placed on a list of infrastructure projects to ‘be accelerated as fast as possible’ by ‘minimising the burden of environmental assessments’ and ‘reforming habitats and species regulation’. Unlike with some of the more infamous ideas from that ‘mini-budget’, there has been no renunciation of this one from the government.

Like many parts of the UK, Sizewell is in a ‘seriously water stressed’ area. The North Sea provides a ready and endless supply of saltwater to cool the steam produced by the reactor, but this water is too corrosive to be mixed with concrete during construction and it lacks the purity to be used in the stage of the process where nuclear fission heats it into steam. Sizewell C will need a supply of about four million litres of ‘potable’ water a day during construction, and then a constant supply of more than two million daily during its lifetime. The government were convinced by EDF’s pledge to build a temporary desalination plant during construction to purify seawater, reducing the strain on local water supply.

Sizewell lies in the Suffolk Coastal parliamentary constituency, a Conservative seat which has been represented since 2010 by Thérèse Coffey. Now the environment secretary, Coffey herself has made her own contribution to mains water-based discourse in her helpful social media interactions with Premier League footballers. Regarding Sizewell C, she joined the RSPB in questioning the granted DCO in light of the Planning Inspectorate’s observations. Immediately to the north of the proposed site lies RSPB Minsmere, a thousand-hectare nature reserve protected by law. It is one of only five UK recipients of the Council of Europe’s Diploma for Protected Areas award, the Council calling it ‘the most important bird reserve in the United Kingdom’. Minsmere is an incredibly diverse mix of rare habitats and is home to significant populations of protected bird species like the bittern, marsh harrier, turtle dove, and avocet. Living a few miles from the reserve means I hear birds that I have never heard before from my window like nightingales. The potential change in the water table, water quality and seawater temperatures, as well as EDF’s reclamation of eight hectares of the Sizewell Marshes Site of Special Scientific Interest for building work, could trigger prey population collapses. Coffey stated that she was ‘surprised’ by the DCO’s decision to evoke an IROPI to override these concerns and that she ‘expect[ed] that applications will go to the High Court’. Go to the High Court they did, with Together Against Sizewell C (another key pressure group) initiating a legal challenge taking place in March this year where the court considered the possibility of a judicial review of the DCO decision. At time of writing, the ruling is still not known.

But Coffey’s vague gestures of dissent during the consultation process are tinged with a subtext. Yes, increased water abstraction in an already parched region during the early part of construction is bad. Lost hectares of wetland habitats are regrettable. Increased train screech and light pollution on the East Suffolk rail line (she herself claims to live 250 metres away) will be annoying. Turning off your driveway onto the B1122 will get more difficult with all those HGVs thundering by. But. These aren’t really the kinds of costs she has in mind when considering the project. It would take something stronger than these local interest groups’ concerns to change her position. Simultaneous catastrophic meltdowns at all of the UK’s current active reactors, say.

There are other issues. Despite the length of its consultation and construction phase, the decades it would be operational for, and the centuries it would stand, Sizewell C’s fortunes are susceptible to the world events of today – seismic in geopolitical terms but ephemeral in the context of nuclear time. As part of the rush to reduce Chinese involvement in UK infrastructure, the government had to buy out China General Nuclear’s 20% stake in the project. And in the context of the war in Ukraine, EDF will look elsewhere for fuel sources once pre-war Russian stocks of uranium run out. Laudable, though it would still necessitate dependence on uranium imports from the US, Canada, Australia and the DRC; and, of course, the plant itself will continue to be owned by the French state.

The longest-term problem, one which will continue long after Sizewell C stops generating power, is the on-site storage of spent fuel and waste. Sizewell C would cease operations at the end of this century and EDF’s applicant assessment assumes that all spent fuel will have been removed from the site by 2140. There are reasons to doubt this optimistic appraisal, not least the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority’s (NDA) own assessment in 2014 that the last spent fuel would not have cooled enough to be removed from the site until at least 2180 – around the time that the asteroid 101955 Bennu has a 1-in-2,700 chance of impacting Earth – or even well into the 23^rd century.

Since then, the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) revised the necessary waste cooling time for Hinkley Point C (an identical reactor) down to 55-60 years, which when applied to Sizewell C would put a decommissioning date of roughly the middle of next century, but this still puts it at odds with the NDA’s figure. Nick Scarr, a consulting engineer for the Nuclear Consulting Group, also questioned the EDF and ONR estimates in papers submitted to the Planning Inspectorate and the now-defunct Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. As he points out, the revision is based on series of assumptions such as either nuclear plant ceasing operation with no lifetime extensions, a Deep Geological Repository being commissioned and constructed somewhere in the UK to store high-grade waste by 2130, and all ‘legacy nuclear waste’ produced at the current Sizewell and Hinkley sites having already been disposed of. So far, no site has been found for deep-level waste burial, in a process which included local communities and councils being asked a decade ago to volunteer themselves as potential sites. Barring the residents of Sellafield in Cumbria (already a site of surface-level nuclear waste disposal for decades), there were no takers, and Cumbria County Council rejected the idea in 2013. Perhaps deep (deep, deep) down, we are all Nimbys.

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Over the warm Easter weekend, the beach at Sizewell attracted families from nearby Leiston and further inland who walked through the thick sea fret, among the yellow horned poppies, gorse, and the occasional adder. So thick was the fog that Sizewell B’s distinctive white dome was invisible, and you could just make out the Hi-Viz jackets of G4S men who flanked the site. The dome is Sizewell’s primary focal point and can be seen from miles away up the coast, likened by WG Sebald in The Rings of Saturn to the Dome of the Rock at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem ‘shining like a shrine’ at night. To me it looks like a giant light sensor on an exposure meter, to Coffey it is ‘iconic’, to the cultural theorist Mark Fisher it was ‘bizarre’. Its clumsy juxtaposition with the dull brown cube of Sizewell A (Sebald: ‘a glowering mausoleum’) is a contrast often found among faculty buildings on red brick university campuses.

On that April day, the site seemed to stand as quietly as possible behind the murk so as not to be noticed, and the assorted walkers obliged, heads bowed or looking only out to sea. Leiston is a five-minute drive inland, the closest town to the plant. It looks like many other towns on the Suffolk coast. It felt more keenly than anywhere the effects of the construction of Sizewell A and B, which opened in 1966 and 1995, respectively. Sizewell B is the UK’s only pressurised water reactor, and may be the only operational nuclear power station of any kind for a time at the end of this decade. A contemporary study of Sizewell B’s seven-year construction found that the nature of complaints about the process from locals and in the local press evolved over time. Predictably, increased road traffic was the primary source of anguish in the early years, before the issue of antisocial behaviour by Sizewell B employees in the Leiston area became prevalent later on. Overall, though, it is noteworthy that total complaints to Nuclear Electric (formerly the Central Electricity Generation Board) reduced significantly over the course of the project. Oxford Brookes’ John Glasson argues that a kind of fatigue may have played a part in this: ‘This process — learning to live with Sizewell B — may partly reflect an acceptance of the inevitability of the project and an adjustment to its impacts’. Curiously, this acceptance may have permanently altered those residents’ outlook on the reality of nuclear power on their doorstep. In the present day, locals surveyed who had lived in the area during Sizewell B’s construction were ‘significantly more supportive’ of Sizewell C than those who had not.

Coffey and those on East Suffolk Council (the parliamentary constituency and council borough have roughly similar borders) impress upon the local population the economic boon that Sizewell C would be. During consultation Coffey has repeatedly stated its importance ‘for local prosperity given the low average income in this part of Suffolk and the country’. The Council predicts 2,000 home-based workers (those who live in a ninety minute radius) could be employed on-site at the peak of construction, adding £700 million of Net Value Added to Suffolk’s economy. History suggests that the project will boost the local workforce to an extent: during Sizewell B’s construction, around half of workers came from within daily commuting distance of the site. An importing of a significantly-sized workforce seems likely for this project, too. SZC Co.’s assessment that ‘With the right timing, there can be a direct transfer of skills from Hinkley Point C to Sizewell C’ was noted by Downes with alarm in her testimony to the Planning Inspectorate.

The construction process for nuclear reactors moves at a glacial pace. The expenses involved can deter large investors, and each stage of a project tends to be accompanied by protests which attract sympathy (if not always outright support) by the generations which remember the Chernobyl disaster and other near-misses. In recent years the planned reactors at Wylfa and Oldbury were cancelled after Horizon Nuclear Power (owned by Japanese conglomerate Hitachi) withdrew its planning application despite the UK government offering to take a one-third stake in the project. The privatisation of power generation and liberalisation of the UK’s energy market in the last thirty years has hampered many similar projects. Operable nuclear capacity has fallen from its late 1990s peak – when it commanded a 26% share of the UK’s electricity mix – and is now similar to 1970s capacity, at about 16%. But things might be changing. The government is hoping that a Regulated Asset Base (RAB) funding mechanism, which places less risk on investors by transferring some of their upfront construction costs to the consumer end, can jump-start their push to build eight new reactors by 2050, which would increase the nuclear power share back up to 25% of the UK’s electricity demand.

Like an optical illusion, nuclear energy has signified different things to different political eras. Despite fears shaping perceptions in the aftermath of Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear has done well out of subsequent international agreements on climate change, re-framing itself as the only viable alternative to fossil fuels. Successive governments since New Labour have re-affirmed their commitment to replenishing Britain’s nuclear stock. Certain lessons are being selectively learned from the current Russo-Ukrainian war, at the expense of others. It is said that the war proves the need for homegrown nuclear energy to reduce our dependence on energy sources from unconscionable regimes, while overlooking the dependence on uranium imports that the conflict has also highlighted, and the dangers of nuclear reactors being used as bargaining chips should the area around them become active warzones, as has happened with the Zaporizhzhia plant.

This is not to say that there is a clear preferable alternative. After Fukushima, Germany accelerated its nuclear phaseout, but it is still grappling with its addiction to Russian gas and to coal – the latter is still its second-largest electricity source. The artist Joanie Lemercier has documented the impacts of the Hambach surface coal mine in North-Rhine Westphalia, the largest single site of greenhouse gas production in Europe. In the video installation Slow Violence, forlorn footage shows machines dismembering the land, with giant excavators scraping away at rock strata, exposed like gingival recession on a tooth. The mine continues to expand: into the 12,000-year-old Hambach forest, 90% of which has already been cleared since mining began; and straight through villages in the surrounding area, which are routinely razed to make way for it.

As for domestic renewable energy, the UK is still some way off having the kind of storage capacity needed to totally rely on energy sources like wind or solar. Issues of retaining wind energy, transporting it, and building the battery capacity to contain it for when there are spikes in usage, are a way off being fully addressed. Nuclear power has readymade answers to these quandaries. But it is these renewable technologies as well as relatively simple demand-side approaches that will play a greater future role in addressing the energy and climate crises. Wind and solar together already outstrip nuclear as contributors to the UK’s electricity mix (25%). Policymakers may prefer building these more eye-catching monuments to renewable energy creation over scaling back consumption, confusing an absence of action with lack of ambition. But as Together Against Sizewell C’s Pete Wilkinson points out, a simple measure applied nationally like replacing all incandescent and halogen bulbs with LED ones would cost an estimated £1.6 billion to do, a fraction of the price of building a power station like Hinkley Point C, and would save annually the equivalent of the Hinkley’s total output. Both approaches will need to be used, and nuclear energy still makes sense in the short-to-medium term.

Nuclear is an old technology. It was already beginning to date when Sizewell B first went on the grid. The first civil nuclear power station went operational at Calder Hall in 1956, and power station cooling towers conjure images of background shots in British New Wave films. Perhaps, then, this mid-century invention can enjoy its swansong in the most constructive way, acting as bridge between old and new energy sources. The question remains, will the future see it the same way?

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In March, I found myself in a large bare room with people wearing brown corduroy jackets and beanies indoors watching short art films about this topic. The Art Station in Saxmundham was hosting ‘The Nuclear Programme’, a series of films curated by the artist Emily Richardson to coincide with her Immaterial Terrain project. Mark Aerial Waller’s Glow Boys (1998) imagines a world where over-exposed nuclear workers become superhuman and immune to radiation’s ill effects. The title references a real-life term (see also: Nuclear Nomads, Luminizers, Liquidators, Gamma Sponges) for nuclear contract workers who jump between power plants once they have exceeded the legal maximum exposure to be able to continue the dangerous but well-remunerated work. In the film, the claustrophobic interior of the power plant has become their permanent habitat because sleep and other mortal concerns are no longer necessary. A middle-era Mark E. Smith is cast as a canteen worker who serenades Worker 508. The film’s soundtrack features a cybernetic-tinged cover of The Fall’s ‘Free Range’.

The mystery of nuclear energy has piqued artists’ curiosity since the war. Glow Boys highlights its strange contradiction: a process which is ‘the harnessing of the basic power of the universe’ as President Truman put it in August 1945, but which is also quite mysterious and banal. The first nation in the world to industrialise, Britain is defined by the crash and bang of industry, whereas a nuclear power plant, represents a neutering of this spirit. Walking past Sizewell’s smooth monolith, its only perceptible emission is a kind of tinnitus hum which gets lost in the wind coming in off the North Sea and over the marshes.

Nearby Dunwich, too, has attracted artistic and intellectual fascination for centuries. JMW Turner, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Brian Eno, WG Sebald, and Mark Fisher have reflected on its slow capitulation to the sea. A major medieval trading port, it is estimated that a quarter of the fleet that sailed to the crusades in 1230 originated there. A series of catastrophic storms in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries did for Dunwich, depositing shingle across its harbour entrance which blocked incoming trade, making it no longer worth saving with sea defences. Over the following 700 years, the sea has eroded Dunwich so that almost the entire town, including around ten churches, is now underwater. Looted by Henry VIII’s Anglican reformers in the sixteenth century, designated as a Rotten Borough in the nineteenth, Dunwich now promotes a policy of ‘managed retreat’ – that is to say, the final stage of grief. ‘If you look out from the cliff-top across the sea towards where the town must once have been, you can sense the immense power of emptiness’, said Sebald.

Dunwich and Sizewell are linked inextricably. For both sites, the sea has and will bring opportunity and danger in unison. Sizewell lies five miles down from the town and is sheltered by Dunwich bank, an offshore mobile sand bank which significantly reduces wave energy before it impacts the shoreline. EDF and SZC Co. may be taking this breakwater for granted. In their own research they quote Pye and Blott (2005) who state that from 1736 to 1836 Sizewell was ‘the most eroded shoreline in the records’.¹ In that hundred-year period, the shore had receded 300 metres. From 1836, cliff erosion at Dunwich deposited sediment at sea which formed the bank, and the Sizewell shore grew back more than 80 metres to where it currently stands. The forming of the bank reversed Sizewell’s fortunes but its formation is susceptible to equally rapid disintegration: it has ‘no inherited stabilising hard geology (i.e., no headland or underpinning crag)’. Historians salivate at the thought of the bank moving landwards and revealing more of the ruins of the town on the seafloor, but for Sizewell it could be disastrous. Once more it would be exposed as one of the concentrated wave ‘energy foci’² along the Suffolk coast, and history suggests the eighteenth-century incursion would resume.

Unsurprisingly, Sizewell C is being built with flood risk in mind. Its main platform will be over seven metres above sea level, and EDF seem to have accounted for possible future breakdown of Dunwich bank. In assessments obtained by Scarr under a Freedom of Information request³, they argue that reductions in the bank could actually help Sizewell in the accretion of more sediment southward: ‘releasing sediment to the system, the soft coastal defence will act to reduce erosion locally, particularly to the south as that is the main direction of sediment transport.’⁴

But their argument comes unstuck when considering two volatile factors which will become more prevalent in the coming centuries, regardless of natural defences: storm surges and rising sea levels. EDF/SZC Co. seem to have based their contingency plans on the RCP8.5 scenario – a climate change scenario adopted by the IPCC which imagines a temperature increase by 2100 of 4.3˚ C above pre-industrial levels (the Paris Agreement’s goal is to keep the rise well below 2 °C). RCP8.5 is intended by the IPCC as a worst-case scenario and has provoked scientific debate over its plausibility, but EDF nevertheless regard it as a ‘reasonably foreseeable’⁵ eventuality.

Major storm surges, the other factor in this equation, are not new to the UK, as Dunwich knows historically. The famous North Sea flood of 1953 which battered Suffolk and killed 2,500 people is defined by the Environment Agency as a 1 in 1,000-year event at a height of 3.44 metres above sea level. However, EDF’s flood risk assessment addendum states that the 1953 flood ‘cannot be considered as especially extreme in the longer-term historical context’,⁶ and points out that in the twentieth century alone there were four roughly 1 in 200-year storm surges in the UK. Considering the IPCC’s assessment that ‘Extreme sea level events that previously occurred once in 100 years could happen every year by the end of this century’, this low-lying area will experience ever more frequent storm surges.

Under these assumptions, EDF’s worst-case scenario assessment combines a 1 in 10,000-year storm surge (5.73 ± 0.29m) with the RCP8.5 sea-level rise projection. They themselves admit that this scenario would lead to minor flooding of the Sizewell C site by the end of next century, should defences be breached or the surrounding low-lying areas flood:

‘Assessment of the extreme still water levels above main platform height (7.3m AOD), presented in Table 4.2, shows that for the 1 in 10,000-year event at 2190 epoch the flood depth on the platform is greater than the building threshold set in the design parameters and for the credible maximum climate change scenarios (i.e. BECC Upper) flood depths are significantly above the main platform height and threshold of the buildings.’⁷

They qualify this slightly: ‘the inundation would be limited to the peak of the surge event only, for a period of approximately 3 hours, and therefore the risk would also be time limited.’

This modelling of flooding effects makes a series of assumptions. Firstly, the assumption that by this time, all nuclear waste will be off-site: ‘it is anticipated that by this time i.e. 2190, there will be very limited (if any) activities on site and most buildings would be decommissioned and demolished.’ As already established, this is a contested claim. More strikingly, it favours the RCP8.5 ‘reasonably foreseeable’ scenario over the BECC Upper (British Energy Climate Change) scenario, the latter of which extrapolates from Met Office-recommended modelling. EDF cites BECC Upper as a ‘credible maximum’ but does not appear to use in its flood risk scenario. This is significant because the RCP8.5 and BECC Upper sea level estimates foresee dramatically differing flooding events. If sea levels rise according to the latter estimate, even a 1 in 200-year storm would be enough to inundate Sizewell C by 2190. Should a 1 in 1,000 or 1 in 10,000-year storm occur, Sizewell C would flood as early as 2140, and by 2190 flood levels would exceed 2.5 metres above the main platform.

As at Fukushima, seawater flooding the site could knock out electrical systems and prevent the reactor core from cooling, leading to overheating, meltdown, and release of radiation into the air and the water. Inundation could breach nuclear waste and spent fuel stores, dispersing it.

The bleak picture would require several worst-case situations to converge, but to consider them is ostensibly the purpose of contingency planning. This is especially true when a drawn-out process like the construction of a power plant is combined with constantly-changing climate change estimates. That EDF have arbitrarily rejected one extreme sea level rise model in favour of a more conservative one to use as the basis for its construction seems misguided. In whatever case, these risks bring into even sharper focus how narrow the window will be to remove all waste from and decommission the Sizewell site by its proposed deadline, and should increase the scrutiny placed on how exactly they plan to achieve this.

Nuclear time operates on a different scale to human time. Thinking about these faraway-seeming dates is to think about a world we will not inhabit. The Treasury has tried to quantify this feeling of detachment in its Green Book, a manual on how to appraise projects. It uses the ‘discount rate’ equation to measure the value of future generations against our own. A higher rate would mean paying less today at the expense of future generations. The part of the equation which signifies the value we place on the future is called the ‘pure time preference rate’ (δ), and it is 0.5% – meaning we discount future wellbeing at 0.5% per year. From where we are standing, we imply that those living 140 years from now (around the time of Sizewell C’s decommissioning) are half as important as we are.

δ is ‘based on the median result from a survey of experts’,⁸ though the IPCC finds that ‘a broad consensus’ of economists object ethically to any δ value greater than zero. To them, valuing people’s wellbeing based on when they live is as indefensible as doing it based on where they live. Seeing those who will live beyond us as our true equals is one of the most difficult but important acts when thinking about Sizewell C. Are we deferring a kindness to them, or a curse?

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[1] (As cited by Scarr here) BEEMS Technical Report Series 2009 no. TR058, Sizewell: Morphology of coastal sandbanks and impact to adjacent shorelines. Page 40

[2] Institute of Oceanographic Sciences, Sizewell-Dunwich banks field study, Topic Report 6, Carr, King, Heathershaw and Leeds. Page 15

[3] Scarr p. 16 ‘BEEMS ‘British Energy Estuarine & Marine Studies’ including BECC ‘British Energy Climate Change’, are technical documents produced and commissioned by the nuclear energy industry to research coastal processes. British Energy has been a wholly owned subsidiary of EDF from 2009. The reports were not in the public domain; some have appeared embedded in DCO documents. These documents are used as defining references by EDF in the Sizewell C DCO and, having been obtained under FOI, are therefore extensively referred to and quoted in this paper.’

[4] DCO: Geomorphology Appendix 20A, op cit., Page 52 of 167.

[5] FRA ADDENDUM: EN010012 Main Development Site Flood Risk Assessment Addendum

[6] BEEMS TR139 p. 138

[7] FRA ADDENDUM: EN010012 Main Development Site Flood Risk Assessment Addendum. 4.3.17]

[8] Freeman, M., Groom, B. and Spackman, M. (2018), ‘Social Discount Rates for Cost−Benefit Analysis: A Report for HM Treasury’, p. 8