Somerset's Hinkley Point C power station is huge. The 176-hectare (435-acre) power plant will provide 3.2 gigawatts of electricity, enough for a 6-meter home. It's not just the project that's huge, but the cost as well. With a reported price tag of £48bn and a delay of at least five years, it has become a symbol of the pitfalls of nuclear power.
However, many companies argue that there is a faster and cheaper option than large Hinkley-sized plants in the form of small modular reactors (SMRs) that can be assembled in factories and assembled on site.
Britain's Rolls-Royce, which also builds nuclear reactors for submarines in Derby, is competing with three North American competitors to win orders from the British government.
Stephen Lovegrove, chairman last year of Rolls-Royce SMR, the joint venture undertaking the project, claimed in an interview at the FTSE 100 company's London headquarters that the company was 18 months ahead of its competitors.
But Mr Lovegrove, who was once the government's top civil servant at the Department of Energy and Ministry of Defence, said the UK government's competition would be delayed by another year, pushing the earliest date for Rolls-Royce's new reactor to 2032 or 2033. expressed dissatisfaction. This goal had already been shifted from 2029 to 2031.
Rolls-Royce has stuck to its plans even though the group's chief executive Tufan Erginbilgic has shut down other speculative businesses in a turnaround plan.
But Rolls-Royce SMR, which is led day-to-day by chief executive Chris Cholerton, has already blamed delays in the government's decision to source key pressure vessels from outside the UK. “Every day that passes without a decision being taken increases the risk that the UK will fall behind its rivals,” Lovegrove said. “It’s definitely holding us back, both nationally and internationally.”
Mr Lovegrove said Britain had “missed a trick” over the past decade in failing to build turbines for the wind energy revolution, including when he led the Department of Energy under a Conservative government.
“Frankly, it was a time of austerity and certain investment decisions needed to be made,” Lovegrove said.
In November, the government added Rolls-Royce SMR, American rivals Holtec and GE Hitachi, and Canadian-owned Westinghouse to the shortlist. Two people are expected to be chosen in a spring statement from Prime Minister Rachel Reeves.
The decision to introduce SMR will be an important milestone in the history of nuclear power generation in the UK. british nuclear power Peaked in 1994 at 12.7 gigawatts (GW)or 17% of the installed generation capacity. Since then, the industry's fortunes have declined due to a lack of new projects to replace aging reactors.
Since Sizewell B opened in 1995, only Hinkley Point B has been approved. Hinckley's sister project, Sizewell C, is also awaiting approval, but its expected costs have also soared to nearly £40bn.
Lovegrove said the first 470-megawatt Rolls-Royce SMR would be installed in the UK and then in the Czech Republic a year or so later, after electricity company Chez Group joined as a joint venture partner this year. He said another unnamed European country will follow suit by 2034. The United States and Gulf states will also be targeted. Qatar's sovereign wealth fund was among the investors who put in £280m, with a further £210m in UK grants.
Whatever the wait, various SMR candidates in the UK and other countries believe nuclear will be the winner, as renewable energy will come on intermittently once the winds die or clouds cover the sun. But another, more recent development is Big Tech’s voracious clean energy demand for generative artificial intelligence.
Last year, Microsoft signed a deal to rehabilitate the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. Google has an SMR agreement with Kairos Power in the United States. Lovegrove said Rolls-Royce would respond to Facebook owner Mehta's call for a nuclear project. The UK government announced on Monday that SMR will support the growth of AI.
Mr Lovegrove, 58, joined the civil service in 2004 after working at investment banks Morgan Grenfell and Deutsche Bank. He rose through the ranks, including serving as a board member for the 2012 London Olympics for seven years, and in 2013 was appointed permanent secretary at the Department of Energy, the highest civil service position.
After leaving government, he returned to the banking industry as an advisor to Lazard and joined Columbia University as a distinguished visiting scholar.
There's a reason the interview took place in an office building (coincidentally shared with the Guardian) rather than a factory. Other than test reactors in China and Russia, SMRs do not exist anywhere else in the world.
Doug Parr, policy director at environmental activist Greenpeace UK, said SMR supporters were too optimistic. That money would be better spent on renewable energy and energy storage, he said.
“Despite the constant hype, a closer look at SMR advances shows that SMRs do not appear to solve any of the problems that large nuclear reactors have,” he said. He cited the experience of NuScale, which abandoned a project in Idaho due to rising costs. Parr said SMR is “much more expensive than renewable energy and just as slow to come online, so it's not very useful for decarbonizing the grid.”
“The only major difference from large nuclear reactors is that SMRs offer the opportunity to spread the nuclear problem over a wider geographical area,” he said.
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Rolls-Royce, Holtec, Westinghouse and other rivals such as NuScale and Russia's Rosatom all use variations of the standard technology, pressurized water reactors (PWRs), but on a smaller scale. The Rolls-Royce reactor building is approximately 2 hectares in area, while other reactor buildings are smaller. However, the key change for SMR is the “modular” aspect. The reactor will be assembled in a factory from truck-sized parts, which will then be assembled at one of the advertised locations from Cumbria to Anglesey and Ynys Mon. North Wales.
This contrasts with the approach of complex stick-built projects such as Hinckley and Sizewell, which involve large sites with no protection from rain.
Lovegrove said the modular approach would “very, very, very significantly reduce the risk of building a nuclear power plant” and would allow two reactors to be built a year, sharing the cost. said. Asked if the SMR process has a Hinckley scar, he said, “SMR is specifically designed as an industrial process to address the cause of that scar.”
If Britain and the Czech Republic go ahead with their orders, “it's a viable business,” Lovegrove said. UK procurement means a budget of £10bn for the three SMRs.
Lovegrove said Rolls-Royce is focused on: Submitted in 2022 That electricity would cost “around £50 to £60 per megawatt hour” in 2012 prices. This would be half the price of Hinckley and competitive with the £54 to £59 price for wind power guaranteed by the UK government at the latest auction in September.
“Nuclear is not a more expensive technology than renewable energy over the life of various projects,” Lovegrove said, citing the extra costs of storing and moving renewable energy. .
Even though the technology is unproven, this is an opportunity for nuclear proponents. Mr Lovegrove spoke of Boris Johnson's national security crisis in February 2022, as Vladimir Putin's all-out invasion of Ukraine sparked a global energy crisis and Europe scrambled to replace Russian gas. He was an assistant in charge.
“Most German policymakers would now accept that such dependence on Russian gas is a strategic weakness,” Lovegrove said. He said Baltic states such as Estonia and Latvia, which are under threat from Russia, are among the countries most interested in Rolls-Royce technology.
Lovegrove is working on another aspect of Britain's response to the rise of authoritarian states. With US approval, the government is conducting a review of the Oaks, an alliance that gives Australia nuclear submarine propulsion from the UK. The partnership will benefit Rolls-Royce by increasing demand for submarine nuclear reactors. Mr Lovegrove said there was no conflict of interest as the SMR company was an independently operated joint venture and Oakes would never be involved in civil nuclear power.
“The Oaks is the most important defense and defense industry collaboration concluded around the world for more than 60 years,” he said.
It is unclear whether the alliance signed by Joe Biden will survive Donald Trump's second term in the White House and beyond. But Lovegrove argued that President Trump should provide “full support” as “security in the Indo-Pacific… will be strengthened.”
Rolls-Royce hopes that the UK government's pursuit of energy security will support British-made technology.
“We have an opportunity to become a leader in small modular nuclear reactors and their supply chain,” he said. “And I really hope we embrace that.”
