Nigel Cann has a big job on. A director of EDF Energy, it is his job to deliver the biggest construction project in Europe: the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant, which is needed as soon as possible to help keep Britain’s lights on, and is a project with vast commercial and political capital riding on it.

Experience suggests that the construction of the first nuclear reactor constructed in Britain for quarter of a century – located on the Somerset coast – will not be straightforward. Similar projects in France and Finland have run into huge delays and cost overruns.

This week EDF has put back the completion date of its newbuild project at Flamanville in Normandy while Areva, another Hinkley shareholder and the designer of the reactors, has admitted it may need a financial bailout.

Fortunately, Cann is a confident kind of chap. He insists he is not overly daunted by Hinkley and its £25bn price tag – the equivalent of putting on almost three London Olympics. “I grew up around the Channel Tunnel rail project. Everyone admired those ‘tunnel tigers’, as they were known, and I want to create the same atmosphere around here.”

It is, he says, “an honour and a challenge to have this responsibility, but I also feel humble,” adding: “I do not underestimate the job. This is the biggest single foreign investment in this country since world war two.”

So what makes him think that EDF and its partner Areva can deliver a working power station in Britain by 2023 – something they have individually or collectively failed to do on time and on budget with similar European Pressurised Reactors (EPRs) at Flamanville and Olkiluoto in Finland? “We spend a lot of time reviewing these other projects and finding out what we can learn from them. We have workshops centred on what went wrong. I admit that some of what I have read is quite ugly.

“There has been a lack of attention to detail in places, some miscommunications. We do a lot of scenario-based training on issues such as the quality of concrete, which was an issue at Olkiluoto. But all the parties are sharing their experiences with us and learning is in our DNA.”

EDF is also taking experience gained from the 2012 Olympics and Heathrow Terminal 5 – signing early agreements with trade unions, using “mock-up” sites to practise construction techniques as well as utilising prefabricated and modular parts.

Cann is sitting in a glorified portable cabin that acts as a viewing gallery, his shirt sleeves rolled up as if ready to start digging himself. Outside, the rain spatters down on massive yellow earthmoving equipment lumbering around mountains of chocolate-coloured earth.

The French company has around 400 people already at work clearing a 175-hectare site next door to Hinkley Point A and B, the first being decommissioned, the latter still operating. Cann’s team is also putting in place roads and roundabouts including a bypass round the small village of Canning so that locals will be saved some of the inconvenience of the 750 trucks a day that will go in an out of the Hinkley site.

EDF spent £5m during September alone on Hinkley Point C, whose generous subsidy regime has just been given the all-clear by Brussels, but EDF has yet to make a final investment decision. This will almost certainly come early in the new year.

Cann, who previously ran Hinkley Point B and before that another nuclear plant at Dungeness in his native Kent, admits the new job is different.

“People think there is not very much going on here yet. But it does not feel that way to me. It is different from going into an existing plant. There is very little structure to start with, and you have got to create it. It is very important to be focused on safety, quality and control. That is really easy to talk about but much harder to do.”

Only 60% of the Somerset project is nuclear – the remaining 40% is conventional work, such as building a sea wall and a jetty to bring in aggregates for construction, plus drilling tunnels for cooling pipelines going out to sea.

One of the key issues for Cann, he says, is to make sure the local community – and Britain more widely – takes as much as it can out of the project, especially in the way of jobs and services.

Critics often suggest that these kinds of colossal projects, especially those run by foreign firms, simply suck in skilled foreign workers at the expense of local, and even nuclear experts have repeatedly warned about British skill shortages.

By the end of next year, he expects to have 2,000 workers on site, moving up to 5,600 at peak time, and Cann is aiming for 24% of recruits to come from Somerset and 34% from within a 90-mile radius. So far, he says, he is beating those targets. He also hopes to train 400 apprentices while procuring nearly 60% of the entire project from a UK supply chain.

“We have had fantastic support from the Somerset chamber of commerce,” he says. “To give one example, we have already seen a local food co-op, the Somerset Larder, set up in preparation for feeding what we estimate to be the 25,000 people who will move through the site over the lifetime of the scheme. But we want to make sure that all this is sustainable, with a wider group of customers beyond HPC [Hinkley Point C], so that that activity continues after the project is complete.”

Nevertheless, Cann faces a truckload of scepticism. The Department of Energy and Climate Change is reviewing whether the project can really be built on time, while leading energy analysts, such as Peter Atherton at Liberum Capital, believe the enormous cost and appalling track record in the nuclear industry of doing things on time mean ministers should scrap Hinkley. Flamanville was meant to be completed by 2012 and yet has just been put back till 2017.

The blame for this has been put on Areva, which is also seven years behind with Olkiluoto 3. Costs for these projects have soared, and while EDF argues Hinkley will cost £16bn, the European commission has already predicted the cost will be closer to £25bn, with much of the cash coming as a subsidy regime ultimately paid for by consumers.

And before the French company gives the go-ahead to the Somerset project, it also needs to finalise shareholdings in the plant. Talks are going on with a variety of potential investors, including Saudi Arabia’s electricity group, as the future of Areva remains in question.

Cann is also aware that his project will compete for skilled British labour at a time when other huge schemes are under way, such as the Thames Tideway and Crossrail tunnels in London and the HS2 rail line, not to mention other nuclear plants planned by Gloucester-based rival Horizon, owned by Hitachi.

“It would be naive and arrogant if we thought this was the only place in town [to work],” says Cann. “But I want people to enjoy working here safely and for them – as for me – we will get a buzz out of building a huge bit of infrastructure that will be here for 100 years. I have had a fantastic career out of nuclear and, after running three power stations, why not leave a legacy?”

Power points

Overseas businesses are queuing up to build nuclear capacity in the UK

• EDF and Areva’s Hinkley Point C will provide power to 5m homes, delivering around 7% of the country’s electricity.

• EDF and Chinese partners are also looking at building plants at Sizewell, in Suffolk, but the latter would also like to build and operate their own facilities in Britain.

• Hitachi of Japan, under the banner of Horizon Nuclear Power, wants to construct plants on existing sites at Oldbury, in Gloucestershire, and Wylfa, in Anglesey, to provide 10m homes with electricity.

• Toshiba has a project with GDF Suez of France to erect another atomic power station near Sellafield, Cumbria using technology provided by Westinghouse Electric, a rival to the Areva design used in EDF’s European Pressurised Reactors.

• Toshiba, in combination with GE of the US, also wants to build a Prism reactor, that could generate electricity by burning high-level radioactive waste, probably again in Cumbria.

• Russian group Rosatom is also keen on constructing power plants in Britain although political fallout from the Ukraine mean these plans are unlikely to progress very far in the near future.

• The Russian and Chinese state-owned nuclear firms are interested in nuclear sites that have not been allocated for new projects. Moscow and Beijing see the UK as a well-regulated environment and think they can use it as a shop window for their technology.