DAVID Cameron and China’s President Xi Jinping will be pleased. The Department of Energy and EDF Energy will be pleased and relieved. So how should the rest of us react to the news, scarcely unexpected, that the China General Nuclear Corporation (CGN) will take a £6 billion stake in the development of the Hinkley Point C power station?

Some, a diminishing number, will assert that a new nuclear plant, possibly the first of three, can have no safe place in the energy mix. Others will question why a strategic need is being met by a French-Chinese joint venture, with CGN gaining a 33.5 per cent share of key infrastructure. Those observing a Conservative government at work will note one irony: the corporation is wholly owned by the Chinese state.

These are lesser matters. Those who have brokered this deal, Chancellor George Osborne among them, have yet to explain why Hinkley Point represents value for the taxpayer’s money. The United Kingdom has given numerous guarantees just to get the station built. Chiefly, it has granted a per megawatt hour “strike price” of £92.50 for the electricity produced. That is better than double the current wholesale price. The cost will come, as enviable certain profit for EDF and CGN, from consumers’ pockets.

Though the station will be built in Somerset, Scotland should take a close interest. For one thing, the Hinkley strike price is also substantially above the guaranteed price for onshore wind. That form of renewable energy has been at the heart of a Scottish strategy, for better or worse, yet Mr Osborne has cut subsidies while giving every assistance to EDF in its long search for an investment partner. The contrast is striking.

Before CGN, an enterprise doing its government’s bidding, no one could be found to join the French in the Hinkley project. That fact alone is troubling. Nuclear plants are fantastically expensive to build – the £18 billion quoted by EDF sounds optimistic, given past experience – and still more expensive to decommission.

Scotland might have its own looming nuclear problem in the ageing form of the Torness station, but all concerned have much to do to prove that Hinkley Point is truly a good deal for Britain.