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LONDON — A few years ago, Britain agreed to allow Beijing to take ownership stakes in China’s newest nuclear power plants, believing it had the nuclear know-how and construction acumen to help replace the country’s aging power plants.

It was a hot moment in British-Chinese relations, an agreement signed in 2015 A carefully choreographed visit to London Chinese President Xi Jinping with then British prime minister David Cameron.

Six years later, England has second thoughts. The financing of a planned power plant overlooking the North Sea, estimated at £20bn ($28bn) and required for decades to maintain a steady flow of electricity, is unexpectedly cast in doubt. Part of the problem: Attracting investors to the one-fifth Chinese-owned project.

Mr. Xi’s authoritarian ambitions and human rights record froze relations with Western countries and forced a broad reconsideration of a number of economic deals with the world’s second largest economy.

In the UK, the backlash to nuclear power echoes the concerns raised by the UK’s accession to the United States last year. Banning Chinese telecoms supplier Huawei from high-speed wireless networks for security reasons.

The 2015 nuclear deal even demands that China be allowed to become the majority owner of a proposed facility of its own design, located about 50 miles from London. Although this project has passed through regulatory channels, it is expected to face strong opposition from lawmakers.

“We cannot allow the technological heart of our power system to be at risk of being corrupted by states that do not share our values,” said Tom Tugendhat, a member of the Conservative Party led by Prime Minister Boris Johnson. foreign affairs committee in parliament.

China has ambitions to become a global supplier of nuclear power plants, but the UK is not the only country to reconsider a deal.

“A model of nations is emerging in Europe that is rethinking nuclear cooperation with China,” said Ted Jones, senior director of the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group in Washington. He pointed to recent disruptions to China’s nuclear power plant business in Romania, the Czech Republic and elsewhere.

Evidence of the risks involved is embedded in financial results published Thursday by Électricité de France, a French utility company that owns and operates Britain’s eight nuclear power plants. The company is halfway through building Britain’s first new station since the 1990s at Hinkley Point in Southwest England, a project one-third owned by China’s state-owned nuclear company China General Nuclear.

In its quarterly results, EDF urged the British government to soon pass legislation allowing for new, less risky financial and regulatory regulation before the company embarks on a North Sea project near a fishing village called Sizewell.

The company said that failing to get these changes could lead to “not making an investment decision,” in other words, walking away from the project.

“This law is really important now,” said Simone Rossi, managing director of the EDF’s British arm, in June, according to Reuters. British officials and EDF executives are negotiating terms for financing the Sizewell project.

EDF, which is majority-owned by the French government, says it can’t afford to pay the project costs upfront and wants to give 80 percent of its stake to a minority holding to make room for other investors.

The arrangement under consideration will allow investors to get an immediate return on their capital spent on the power plant through surcharges to their energy bills. Pension funds, college endowments and investors alike will likely be impacted by predictable, long-term income streams, analysts said.

“You’ll find interested investors,” said Meike Becker, a public service analyst at Bernstein, a research firm.

But the critical question is whether the presence of Chinese General Nuclear will give pause to financial institutions, especially those from the United States.

in 2019 company blacklisted by the US government – for embarking on efforts to acquire advanced American nuclear technology for military purposes – restricting American companies from doing business with it. An American in 2016 2 years jail for nuclear engineer for helping the company develop nuclear materials.

“CGN has a particularly bad reputation in the United States,” said Vincent C. Zabielski, a London-based special counsel specializing in nuclear issues at Pillsbury, a law firm. Mr. Zabielski said investors may decide that CGN would gain valuable engineering skills to build the facility, but the company’s presence could be “in some cases” a turn-off for American investors.

China General Nuclear declined to comment.

Ultimately, the government will decide the fate of Britain’s nuclear program; One of the options said to be on the table is for the British government to buy China’s stake in the Sizewell project. In principle, the government wants at least one more power plant after Hinkley Point to help meet its ambitious low-carbon targets. The Sizewell plant will pump enough power for millions of homes over the decades. Building a factory would also create thousands of jobs and provide billions of pounds worth of jobs to British suppliers.

China’s global nuclear ambitions are at stake in the UK. Plans to build a nuclear power plant outside of London at Bradwell-on-Sea are undergoing the UK’s approval process; This is a critical step that Beijing hopes will be a springboard for its acceptance in other international markets.

Mark Hibbs, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said China “is making every effort to set Chinese standards” in the global nuclear industry. China said if it succeeds in the UK, it will give the country a competitive advantage in global nuclear sales for decades.

But the British government resented Beijing over a number of concerns, including crackdowns on dissidents in Hong Kong, a former British colony, and harsh treatment of Uighurs in China’s Xinjiang region. Concerns about the security risks of using Chinese technology have also grown in Washington-affected London.

Industry sources say it’s now hard to imagine the government approving a Chinese-designed and majority-owned facility not far from London, as designed for the project in Bradwell.

The situation may be different in Hinkley Point, where the Chinese company has a 33 percent stake, and in the proposed Sizewell project, where the stake is 20 percent. Overall, China General Nuclear has spent around £4 billion on British projects. Mr Tugendhat said he has no objection to Chinese currency in these cases because it can be easily exchanged.