In other words, wind power expensive, nuclear power cheap (in comparison to wind). But Oxera’s methodology has been challenged. It ignores the tens of billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money which have been spent in developing and cleaning up after the nuclear industry over the past 50 years, and ignores the rate at which wind power technology is becoming cheaper - to the point that, Tony White warns, government action should be considered soon to stop the owners of onshore wind farms making “superprofits”.

When no new reactors have been built in the west for so long, too, working out how much they might cost is an inexact science. “Nobody’s built one of these things in Europe for 20 years,” says Juniper. “Where are these figures coming from?” A report just out from an independent think tank, the New Economics Foundation, suggests that the costs of a new generation of reactors in Britain has been underestimated almost by a factor of three.

The picture in the US is even murkier, with the newly renewed Price-Anderson Act subsidizing and capping the nuclear industry’s liability.

I’m reminded of the ongoing and unresolved dispute over the net energy gain in using alcohol as a gasoline substitute. None of the studies I’ve read are entirely convincing.