Julia Pyke is on a mission to show the nuclear industry is filled with “nice, normal people”. As joint managing director of Sizewell C, a planned nuclear power station on England’s Suffolk coast, she has to win over campaigners, as well as the UK government, which has already committed billions of pounds towards the project.
Her attempts have included an unconventional move to set up a choir at the facility. “We want to make ourselves much more accessible,” says Pyke, herself a former choral scholar. She brought the singers to London for the nuclear industry’s annual bash to perform “Let it Be, Sizewell C”, a take on The Beatles’ song, to assembled dignitaries. “It made me laugh,” she says. “Obviously people were drunk, but by the end of it they were waving their phones in the air.”
Pyke’s affability, she hopes, is an advantage as the company seeks to improve the perception of the nuclear industry — which she says has “really undersold itself”. Amid fierce opposition from many in the local community, Pyke must convince detractors not just of the importance of Sizewell C in Britain’s transition to cleaner energy but also as an economic hub that creates jobs. The stakes are high as officials are set to make the final funding decision within months.
“I didn’t come in to do this for money,” says Pyke. “I came in to do this because I think this is a really important thing to do and to get right for Britain . . . The country needs it for energy security.”
The coastal site is a huge infrastructure project that aims to supply 6mn homes with low-carbon electricity from 2035. But industry and Whitehall figures estimate build costs could rise to as much as £40bn, double the £20bn estimate given by developer EDF and the UK government in 2020. Pyke points to the government’s earlier statement that it does not recognise the figure. It is Pyke who is responsible for the finance, legal and external affairs aspects of the project, including interactions with government and local councils. Her co-head, Nigel Cann, leads on the operational side and construction delivery.
Pyke, a former lawyer at Herbert Smith Freehills, is earnest and well prepared but is also aware of the things she cannot control. She says she has “a high tolerance for stress”, and acknowledges “it’s a tough gig, developing big infrastructure projects in the UK”.
Sizewell’s sister project, the Hinkley Point C plant in Somerset, is billions of pounds over budget and several years delayed, contributing to widespread scepticism about the nuclear industry’s ability to deliver. Meanwhile, the UK’s reputation for building big infrastructure projects has been tarnished by delays and high costs on other developments.
“You’ve got this combination of doing something that is intrinsically complicated, building a power station, [then] forming a company, supporting a massive capital raise, plus doing that in quite a politicised environment and everything that comes with building big infrastructure in the UK, which is you have people who don’t want you to do it,” she says. Local campaigners under the banner Stop Sizewell C have appealed in vain to the High Court to block the development.
Part of the difficulty is the “inevitable and correct scrutiny [that] comes with doing something that is facing into government and something of the scale and public significance of Sizewell”, Pyke says.
France’s EDF, which owns a 24 per cent stake, argues that Sizewell C is in a different position from Hinkley — the team has learnt from past mistakes and is able to follow designs that already exist, which is bringing down costs. “We are able to demonstrate that when we do it again . . . we are able to do it better,” says Pyke.
Still, the challenges keep her on edge. “There’s this constant . . . need to watch for things going horribly wrong in some sort of unexpected way.” So far things have not gone entirely to plan, with the government’s timeline to reach a final investment decision having already slipped by months. It has led to speculation about whether investors are sufficiently enthusiastic. But Pyke insists the project is on track. “There’s this massive uptick in interest in nuclear around the world, and that is reflected in the capital competition,” she says. “I know [some campaigners] want to believe that it’s all a terrible failure, but truly, it isn’t.”
One counter argument to the protesters, she says, is that the industry “gives people really good jobs”. Cann, for example, started off as a 16-year-old electrical apprentice. Sizewell C seeks to hire as many local people as possible. At present, the project has 1,000 people on-site, with 2,000 expected by the end of the year and 7,900 jobs at peak construction, about a third of which will be local.
“There is a big generational shift in which younger people are more enthusiastic” than older people who grew up in the era of campaigning for the elimination of nuclear weapons, says Pyke. “There is an absolute revolution in people seeing [nuclear] as green, as a necessary part of the future.”
She says Sizewell C is a “massive generator of skills” and is set to train at least 1,500 apprentices, helping to revive lost expertise in the UK, such as welding.
This makes her acutely aware of what is at risk. “We’re saying to kids, don’t go to university, come into our graduate apprenticeship scheme . . . If you’ve persuaded people to come and work for something that doesn’t ultimately happen, that’s not a good feeling.”
Pyke is also pushing Sizewell to work with former armed forces and ex-offenders. “We have a very structured approach, we offer education on-site, we offer very high welfare standards . . . It’s a very good first place to come and work.”
Pyke went to a state comprehensive school before attending Cambridge, where she studied English. She says she benefited from “nice, stable parents” who were teachers and interested in her thriving. “I stuck with the course, in terms of dutifully pursuing exam results and piano grades.” When she arrived at university, she realised how differently she presented herself compared with students from private school backgrounds. “They were just a lot more articulate and a lot more used to thinking their own view was of interest.”
A day in the life of Julia Pyke
7am Get up. I need my sleep — and I’m not a fan of breakfast, even though I know I should be.
Working day I use the train journey, generally to our London office or to the site in Suffolk, to catch up on emails and reading.
I tend to spend most of every day in meetings: with the Sizewell C team, government and stakeholders. I also spend time representing Sizewell C externally, to spread understanding of the importance of nuclear in the UK.
Evening If I don’t have any events, I go home and have dinner with my family — husband, two sons and a daughter, plus two dogs, four cats and some chickens — and try to switch off (not always successfully). I’m going to claim that I go and use the treadmill so that by the time this is printed it might be true!
From an early age, Pyke says she was obsessed with fairness. “As a Catholic in the 1970s, I wasn’t allowed on the altar, and my brother was . . . an altar boy. He got this box of chocolates one Christmas . . . and I was consumed with the unfairness of this.” Gender bias has been present in various guises throughout her career. Early on in the legal profession, she was told by a partner: “Julia, I hope that when my daughters grow up, they’re like you. Not too pretty, just nice.”
Today, she says parts of the industry still treat her differently from her co-head. “I do sometimes still feel other people are in a club of boys, and I’m not in it.” Like many other female chief executives who believe they are penalised more harshly for mistakes, Pyke says: “Women’s personalities are more scrutinised and you are less free to be yourself.” She remembers: “When I was going through partnership, people would say of me, ‘Oh, she’s a bit spiky.’”
Today, she and Cann “don’t really play good cop, bad cop, but . . . the diversity of personality and background enables us to appeal to and communicate with a much broader range of people than either one of us would naturally fit in with”.
She blames the size of the UK and its comparatively few major works, for the problems it has faced developing game-changing infrastructure. “If you’re looking at a high-speed railway line, or you’re looking at a nuclear power station, we don’t do enough of them sufficiently often, so every one is, in itself, a story.”
She also worries that the country undervalues engineering — “we need to make nuclear and engineering an aspirational career . . . In France it is really an aspirational career.
“What keeps me up at night really is failing to make the case.”
