Nick Baldwin
Nicholas Peter Baldwin, CBE, FIMechE, FIET, born 17 December 1952 in Gosport, is a British businessman who serves as the Chairman of the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR). He was the Chief Executive of Powergen from 2001 to 2002, and the company later became part of E.ON UK.
He earned a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from City University (now City, University of London) in 1975 and an MSc in economics from Birkbeck College. He joined Powergen in 1989 and led the company during its sale to E.ON for £9.6 billion, completed in January 2002. The UK arm of National Power had been sold to RWE in 2000.
Baldwin was Interim Chairman of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority from 2007 to 2008 and worked there from 2004 to 2011. He became Chairman of the ONR in 2011, and the ONR became an independent public body in April 2014. He was appointed a CBE in the 2017 Birthday Honours for services to nuclear safety, security, and charity. He was replaced as ONR chair by Mark McAllister on 1 April 2019.
On the personal side, he married Adrienne Plunkett in March 2002 in Evesham. They have a son and a daughter and live in Worcester.
In September 2000, Baldwin was struck by lightning during a horse-riding holiday in Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah. He suffered serious burns and head injuries and spent three days in intensive care in Salt Lake City, with no memory of the incident for two days. A lightning bolt can carry up to about one million volts.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 05:47 (CET).