small is beautiful
Back in the day you would’ve found me, as a young, naïve teenager, sporting the ubiquitous red and yellow ‘Nuclear Power? No Thanks’ badge at all the best places in town, including a protest at Lancashire’s Heysham power station, just down the coast from the Windscale (now Sellafield) plant. Not the smartest of moves as the ol’ man worked there and good jobs were hard to come by. So, it may come as a surprise that I’m now a convert, a veritable nuclear evangelist, who believes we have no alternative but to embrace a whole new raft of nuclear power stations. The Tory government has too given nuclear a thumbs-up in its plan to reduce carbon emissions to net-zero by 2050. And, boy are we going to need it.
Currently, broadly-speaking, fossil-fuel (gas, coal & oil) provides 60% of our electricity, wind 20%, nuclear about the same and solar 4%. Driven by EVs and low-carbon heating, demand is expected to double by the time of eventual net-zero and the intention is replace these sources by renewables, nuclear and hydrogen. Renewables have to massively expand but sadly will always be reliant upon weather conditions and hydrogen remains the great-unknown in terms of scale and viability. This means we have no alternative than to let nuclear do the heavy lifting. However, all but one of the UK’s thirteen nuclear reactors are due to be decommissioned by 2030. Uh oh.
Over a decade ago, permission was granted for eight traditionally large reactors to be built in England and Wales but fast forward to today and only one, Hinkley Point C in Somerset, is being built. All the others have fallen by the wayside as they are proving too expensive and long-term commitment is uncertain. Even Hinkley involved paying EDF, a state-owned French firm, a way-over market-rate fixed price, and the project remains late and over-budget. However, Rolls Royce thinks it has the answer: small modular reactors (SMRs), which it believes will be affordable (£2.2bn vs £23bn) and take around four years to construct as opposed to almost twenty.
Obviously, this raises the question of exactly how safe are nuclear reactors generally and SMRs specifically?
The biggest challenge, especially taking into account what’s happening in the Ukraine, is to overcome decades of public mistrust and safety scepticism. Highly visible incidents (Sellafield’s fire in 1957, 1986’s Chernobyl and Fukushima in 2011) tend to live long in the public memory. The counter arguments are that modern reactors bear little resemblance to older ones and that all earlier incidents occurred when clear and easily avoidable mistakes were made. Furthermore, a UN report details that as few as fifty deaths can be directly attributed to Chernobyl and ten years after Fukushima no adverse health effects can be identified. However, many understandably remain unconvinced due to the threat of terror attacks and nuclear weapon proliferation inherent within the use of nuclear power. And would you want to live in one’s shadow?
Apparently, the tech for Roll’s SMR design is a scaled-down version of their Royal Navy nuclear fission submarine design, which has been in use in various guises since the 1960s, but standardised, modular and built on a cost-effective production line. Their size, about two footie pitches, makes them adaptable and relatively discreet. The potential cost and predicted speed of build could provide a valuable, secure, indigenous and reliable source of power.
The big drawback is that, similar to hydrogen power generation, SMRs don’t yet exist. Furthermore, Britain still does not yet have a long-term storage solution for radioactive waste and, though a site has allegedly been earmarked, it has yet to be announced. Notwithstanding, Rolls Royce has successfully raised over £200m to specifically develop SMRs and the government have matched this amount. The company aims to complete its first SMR plant by 2031, after which it anticipates two every subsequent year.
Yes, wind and solar farms can be built in a far shorter time, and at a fraction of the cost of nuclear but we cannot put all our future energy eggs into the one renewable basket. Many countries are now playing catch-up in the SMR game, including both China and the US, and we need to strike whilst the uranium core is hot. Despite a high degree of uncertainty, the enormous challenges of climate change and carbon net-zero must surely force our hand in moving forward with SMRs otherwise we risk missing the boat on a technology that could be low carbon, scalable and affordable.
