Labours new plan for siting many small modular reactor (SMR) plants around the UK feels almost like something Trump would come up with. As I argued in a letter to the Guardian, the reality is that many of them would not be small - for example, the system being developed by Rolls Royce is 470 MW, larger than most of the old, now closed, Magnox reactors that were built in the UK in the 1960s. And whatever the design chosen they will not be cheap - even backers, like the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, have admitted that they ‘could have higher costs per MW compared to gigawatt-scale reactors’.
In addition, there would be a range of safety and security risk issues with local deployment, especially with large numbers of small units in or near urban areas- nuclear plants are usually located in remote sites. Will many people want one near them? By comparison, with costs falling, as I noted in my last post, public support for renewables, like solar and offshore wind, has never been higher. And that technology exists now, with, for example, wind already meeting 30% of UKs annual power needs and renewables overall around 42%.
By contrast the, UK only gets around 15% of its power from nuclear, most of it from old AGR plants due for retirement soon. EDF’s new large EPR being built at Hinkley Point was meant to be running now but may not get fully going until 2032. The government seems to think that some SMRs will also be starting by around then, but that’s very optimistic – there are none running yet anywhere in the world and many unknowns.
To be fair though, there are, globally, many nuclear plants of various types and scales supplying about 10% of global power. But capacity is not expanding. As of 1 Jan. 2025, according to the World Nuclear Industry Status Report team, 411 nuclear reactors were operating in the world- two units less than one year earlier- with the same combined capacity of 371 GW. However, although they say that ‘construction of new nuclear plants was underway in 13 countries’, they point out that this ‘is two fewer countries than a year ago’, while ‘outside of China, the number of reactors under construction dropped by one’. They go on ‘in 2024, seven new reactors with a total capacity of 8.2GW were connected to the grid - three in China and one each in France, India, the United Arab Emirates & the United States, while 4 totalling 3.9 GW were closed- two in Canada and one each in Russia & Taiwan. The net increase in operating nuclear capacity was thus 4.3 GW. This compares with an estimated 161 GW of solar capacity added in China in the first 9 months of 2024, and about 40 GW of grid solar added in the US in 2024’.
What next? In the USA, several new projects have been mooted, some of them being SMRs and some being to support US AI/data centre programmes. As Jonathon Porritt has noted in a timely overview 'Google has done a deal with Kairos Power for a “fleet of advanced nuclear power stations, providing us with 500 MW by 2035.” Amazon has pledged $500 m towards a 300 MW small modular reactor by the end of the decade’. He adds that some more novel technologies are also being supported: ‘Bill Gates has started construction on TerraPower’s Natrium fast reactor on the site of a retired coal power plant in Wyoming - courtesy of $2 bn from the Department of Energy, coming on top of all the billions of taxpayers’ dollars he’s already received. Microsoft has signed up as the first customer for electricity from Sam Altman’s fusion start-up with Helion Energy - promised by 2028!’
Clearly not all these projects may prosper and some are very speculative. Liquid sodium-cooled fast neutron reactors have been tried before e.g. in the US, France and the UK, and been abandoned. And as for fusion, well, as Porritt says wryly ‘Altman’s $375 m will deliver in a few years what tens of billions of dollars of public money have failed to deliver over 75 years!’ Some seem to think that restarting old conventional plants will be easier, and as Porritt notes, to power an AI/date centre, Microsoft has signed ‘a 20-year Power Purchase Agreement with Constellation Energy (with $1.6 bn as table stakes) to restart one of the units at the Three Mile Island reactor’- which you may recall had suffered a melt-down back in 1979. But all is not going well: Constellation Energy’s share value fell 21% after the news broke of China’s cheap possibly less energy using Deep Seek AI breakthrough.
As can be seen, although there are big uncertainties and risks, some of these projects are being funded by the US government- and that’s despite their high cost. Porritt notes that ‘Microsoft has already committed to paying twice as much for each unit of nuclear electricity as it would have to pay for renewable electricity’. Though, he goes on, ‘Federal tax credits available to restart closed nuclear power plants will sweeten the deal. Just as they already have for the global energy giant Holtec, which secured a $1.5 bn loan from the Department of Energy (through the Inflation Reduction Act) to reopen the Palisades nuclear reactor, which closed in 2022’. He notes that ‘the loan was originally to decommission the reactor, but now there's a much more lucrative AI-enabled deal to be done!’
It remains to be seen whether any of these projects will prosper and whether Trump will actually continue to provide federal support. So far, unlike the climate and renewables programmes, nuclear seems to have escaped the cuts imposed by his Executive orders. But if SMRs, like new nuclear generally, start looking expensive, that may change. That does seem to be possible. For example, the initial SMR leader, NuScale’s mini PWR, fell foul of adverse economics in the US, and some see the prospect for SMR's generally as uncertain . And, in terms of large projects, there are big funding uncertainties across the board, as I noted in an earlier post in relation to the UK and France.
There have also been planning issues, but, while that may halt some projects, far from it being blocked by over-zealous planning rules, as some have claimed in the UK, it was the poor economics that did for the new nuclear power station proposed by Hitachi on Anglesey in Wales. Meantime, as costs fall, renewable energy projects accelerate ahead around the world- although, arguably, the pace would be higher if resources were not being diverted into costly and dubious nuclear projects.
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