Sunday Times 9th July
From the roof of Oldbury nuclear power station in south Gloucestershire, site manager Mark Pitts surveys a glorious scene. The closed-down site, home to two Magnox reactors, has a panoramic view of farmland and the Severn estuary, hazy in the sunshine. Pitts started work at the plant in 2001, when it was a working power station. It’s now his job to tear it all down. “It’s difficult, sometimes, when it’s the first power station you worked at,” he said. “People get attached.”
Decommissioning a nuclear power station is not a quick job. Fuel and waste must be removed. The buildings need to be dismantled. And in the case of the Magnox fleet, built in the 1960s, there’s lots of horrible asbestos to treat. Oldbury stopped generating power in 2012. In 2015, its retro control room — all switches and dials straight out of an episode of 1970s Doctor Who — was finally shut off. But Pitts and his team expect to be working on the site to the end of this decade and beyond.
Sites such as Oldbury could soon enjoy a new lease of life, however. The UK government wants a huge increase in nuclear energy by 2050 to hit targets around zero emissions and has set up a new body called Great British Nuclear to oversee future projects. Companies around the world are circling the UK with the goal of building small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs). These would be built in factories and transported by road to be assembled on former nuclear sites, reducing the infrastructure needed.
Oldbury has been shortlisted as one potential SMR location by the FTSE giant Rolls-Royce, which is hoping to sell its new model reactor to the government. Chief among the attractions of an SMR is the cost: one small reactor could cost in the region of £2 billion, as opposed to the £20 billion or more for the Sizewell C plant proposed in Suffolk.
This week, energy secretary Grant Shapps will formally kick off a competition to pick the first SMR builder, with a winner to be chosen by the autumn. A beauty parade of about 15 nuclear firms has already been wooing officials in a series of meetings. “The barriers to entry to nuclear have come down,” explained Simon Irish, chief executive of Terrestrial Energy, one eager start-up. “The industry has accumulated a tremendous capacity to innovate efficiently thanks to the computing power that we have access to today. And it’s being done by aggressive, entrepreneurial private companies who are looking at things very differently to incumbents.”
It was not always thus. The Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011 drained the world of confidence in nuclear power. But the need to decarbonise and hit “net zero” by the middle of the century has prompted a rethink. Nuclear’s proponents say it is emission-free and can provide baseload power when wind and solar dip. In the wake of the Ukraine war, it offers the possibility of bolstering energy security — if countries can source enough uranium fuel from outside Russia, which is a big supplier to the industry.
Down the line, mini-nukes could be put next to power-hungry factories, or help to generate the electricity to make hydrogen for industry and transport. To begin with, however, they are likely to be built on sites already licensed for nuclear. These are typically on the coast, close to water for cooling, with good connections to the grid. At Oldbury, the pylons stop right outside the rusting shell of the turbine hall. SMR developers are eyeing ten or so former nuclear sites, as well as those that may become available as the rest of Britain’s nuclear fleet is switched off later this decade.
Rolls, which has decades of experience building nuclear submarines for the Royal Navy, has set up a consortium to convince the government of the merits of its own SMR design. Its pitch makes great play of its “home-grown” credentials.
Arrayed against it are a host of foreign rivals — foremost among them GE Hitachi, a subsidiary of General Electric, which wants to sell its BWRX-300 reactor to the UK; it has one plant already in development in Ontario. Jay Wileman, chief executive, said the process of building its reactor was “like assembling Lego blocks”. “You put the parts together in the factory, move them to the site, then place them in an excavated hole and build it up from there,” he said. “It really simplifies the process.”
Industry sources suggest that Rolls and GE Hitachi are considered the frontrunners in Great British Nuclear’s competition. But officials are also running the rule over newer, more exotic types of nuclear reactors called advanced modular reactors (AMRs). The government is expected to adopt a twin-track approach, with more conventional SMRs in the first wave and AMRs in the second — a tactic that could keep developers keen if they don’t make the cut in the competition. One leader in the AMR pack is a company called TerraPower, founded and chaired by Bill Gates. Its sodium fast reactor has the ability to increase output according to electricity demand. It has bagged $2 billion from the US government to build a plant in Wyoming. TerraPower told The Sunday Times: “Our leadership visited the UK last month and participated in a variety of meetings to discuss the role for advanced nuclear in reaching the UK’s net-zero energy targets.”
Maryland-based X-Energy, meanwhile, reckons it could build at least 40 of its mini-reactors in the UK, starting in Hartlepool. It too has secured US government money to build a pilot of its gas-cooled “pebble bed” reactor in Texas. Carol Tansley, X-Energy boss in the UK, said that this would “de-risk” any project in Britain. “All the risks around the technology, construction, manufacturing assembly — a lot of those will have already been eliminated through what we’ve done in the US before we start in the UK,” she said.
Closer to home, start-up MoltexFlex hopes to attract government support for its molten salt reactor; Shapps paid a visit to its Warrington site in April. “We’re in a really beautiful moment where you’ve got British companies like Rolls-Royce innovating in existing technologies, and people like us innovating in fundamentally new tech,” said David Landon, MoltexFlex boss.
Not everyone is enamoured of the rush for new nukes. Greenpeace pointed to a University of Pennsylvania study that suggested “SMRs will exacerbate the challenges of nuclear waste management and disposal”. Dr Doug Parr, chief scientist for Greenpeace UK, said: “The nuclear industry claims their new reactor designs are cheap and clean, but independent studies . . . suggest even higher costs and more waste.”
The sector’s supporters believe the upswing in interest will be sustained, with countries such as the Czech Republic and Poland drawing up nuclear plans. Last month Sweden voted to relax rules restricting new nuclear that dated back 40 years. Professor Paul Norman, director of the Birmingham Centre for Nuclear Education and Research, predicted that the UK would keep its options open on SMRs. “We’d probably benefit from two or three technologies. You don’t want too many different designs, but you probably also want a bit of diversity and competition between vendors.”
Norman noted, however, that the government has been coy on just how much money Great British Nuclear has to deploy. “There’s a big difference between having SMR competitions and actually putting up the few billion needed to get them built.” Ministers are expected to offer to part-fund SMR development, with private capital making up the rest.
The uncertainty around money is a legacy of Great British Nuclear’s rocky start: it was a Boris Johnson concept that barely survived the transition to Rishi Sunak’s administration. Industry wags joke that Shapps’ speech this week will be the third or fourth launch of the body.
In Oldbury-on-Severn, near Bristol, Pitts is focused on the job of breaking up a chunk of Britain’s nuclear heritage. While he has no say over the future of the site, he is hopeful that an SMR could one day appear on the adjacent heathland that was once home to a silt lagoon containing water from the plant. “It would be great for the local area,” he said. “People here are nuclear friendly. They understand it.”
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