The government fired the starting gun today for the rebirth of Britain’s nuclear power industry, announcing the names of eleven sites earmarked for construction of new reactors.

Each of the new stations will cost £4.5 billion to build and will be powerful enough to supply as many as 2 million homes with electricity for up to 60 years.

Energy experts warned that the first one would not be ready before 2017 at the earliest — too late to avoid a yawning gap opening up in Britain’s energy supplies with a string of ageing coal and nuclear stations set to close over the next few years.

Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, said that the list of new sites — all of which are located at or close to existing nuclear stations and which span the country from West Cumbria to Kent and Somerset — represented “another important step towards a new generation of nuclear power stations”.

“Nuclear power is part of the low-carbon future for Britain. It also has the potential to offer thousands of jobs to the UK and multimillion-pound opportunities to British businesses.”

The public now has one month to respond to the list of sites, including Hinkley Point in Somerset and Sizewell in Suffolk, considered the frontrunners for the first two stations to be built by the French power giant EDF.

Other sites thought to be among the first wave of new reactors include Wylfa in Anglesey; Oldbury in Gloucestershire; and Bradwell in Essex.

The list also includes Dungeness in Kent; Hartlepool in Cleveland; Heysham in Lancashire; and three separate sites in West Cumbria at Sellafield, Braystones and Kirksanton.

Craig Lowrey, head of energy markets at EIC, an independent consultancy, pointed out that the new plants would arrive too late to help Britain avoid a dangerous slide towards an unhealthy dependency on electricity produced from gas-fired power stations.

This was an unwelcome development because of the carbon emissions associated with burning gas and because the UK was running short of its own supplies in the North Sea,forcing it to import more and more of the fuel from countries such as Russia, Algeria and Qatar, Dr Lowrey said.

Britain’s current fleet of power stations — including coal, gas, nuclear, hydroelectric, wind and biomass stations — have a generating capacity of about 83.5 gigawatts. Roughly a quarter of that (22-23 gigawatts) is set to close in the next few years as ageing nuclear plants are retired from service, while a big chunk of coal-fired generation is set to close by 2015 to meet tough new European rules on the use of coal and oil-fired power stations.

The announcement of the nuclear sites also triggered a wave of protest from environmental groups, which argue that the high costs involved and the waste produced by nuclear stations do not justify the contribution they will make in cutting UK carbon emissions.

"We urgently need to end our addiction to fossil fuels, but breathing new life into the failed nuclear experiment is not the answer,” said Robin Webster, energy campaigner for Friends of the Earth. "Nuclear power leaves a deadly legacy of radioactive waste that remains highly dangerous for tens of thousands of years and costs tens of billions of pounds to manage.

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