New UK power station to be "most expensive object on earth"

At an estimated $35bn lifetime cost, the new Hinkley C reactor will be more expensive than any other civil engineering project on planet Earth, reports the BBC.

For that sum you could build a small forest of Burj Khalifas - the world's tallest building, in Dubai, cost a piffling 1bn ($1.5bn). You could also knock up more than 70 miles of particle accelerator. The 17-mile-long Large Hadron Collider, built under the border between France and Switzerland to unlock the secrets of the universe, cost a mere 4bn ($5.8bn). The most expensive bridge ever constructed is the eastern replacement span of the Oakland Bay Bridge in San Francisco, designed to withstand the strongest earthquake seismologists would expect within the next 1,500 years. That cost about 4.5bn ($6.5bn).

Even the Great Pyramid would cost less than a billion to make, now, and require only a few hundred workers. But there is one man-made object pricier than a new nuclear power station in a western democracy: the international space station, alleged to have cost more than $100bn.