Home-grown small reactors on agenda to revive nuclear programme

Leading British businesses and universities are pinning their hopes on home-grown small reactors to help revive the country's stalled nuclear power station programme.

Delays continue to plague efforts by foreign companies to build the country's first plants in a generation. Some 400 construction workers have been laid off by EDF, which is building one at Hinkley Point, as the French company and its Chinese partners haggle over electricity prices with the government.

Rolls-Royce, the engineering business, and industry experts are pressing the government to fund research into small modular reactors that could be built in the UK and taken from factory to site on the back of a lorry.

The government has agreed to study the feasibility of the technology after a committee of MPs called for more research in March.

In contrast to the £24.5bn required for Hinkley Point, earmarked to open in 2023, an SMR could cost less than £1bn. Each unit would have up to 300MW power and several could be deployed together to create mini-power stations. The two Areva reactors being installed at Hinkley have capacity of 1650MW.

Sheffield University has already begun work with Nuscale, a US company, on a design.

There could be a "very significant market for SMRs", said the National Nuclear Laboratory, a state body, in a report in December. The UK could gain a lead in the technology and a market that could be worth £250bn-£400bn between now and 2035.

The UK could derive 7GW of power from SMRs by that year. Research collaborators included Amec, the civil engineering business, and Manchester University.

"With little or no intellectual property for the UK in the proposed new nuclear stations in the UK, an SMR programme would create significant long-term value for UK companies," said Mike Tynan, chief executive of the University of Sheffield's Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre.

"The ability to manufacture a UK SMR in controlled factory conditions would be a major contributor to reduced electricity prices from the SMR, as well as creating thousands of long-term, sustainable jobs and a major export opportunity."

They could be similar to the units that propel nuclear submarines. Companies such as Rolls-Royce and Sheffield Forgemasters already provide parts for them and other nuclear reactors worldwide.

Paul Stein, chief scientific officer at Rolls-Royce, told MPs they could be built in a "five to seven-year timeframe, as long as we use existing, proven designs".

Nuscale is one of four companies designing pressurised water SMRs that could be viable within a decade, the NNL says. The others are Westinghouse, owned by Japan's Toshiba, which provides them to the US, CNNC of China, and a consortium of B&W and Bechtel.

Penultimate Power UK, an industry consortium, has also begun work in Newcastle. It hopes to set up a northeast manufacturing base. Candida Whitmill, managing director, declined to name its members.

"The UK does have the capacity to built 100 per cent of SMRs" whereas it could only build 60 per cent of the new large reactors, she says, adding that given existing overseas supply chains, it might not get the opportunity to supply that much.

Ms Whitmill says generating costs would be "about the same as offshore wind" but declined to be more specific. Unlike offshore wind, she says they are available for 92 per cent of the time. They would last 60 years, although the problem of what to do with spent fuel remained.

SMRs would take about three years to build, in contrast to eight to 10 years for EPRs, she said. "The main advantage is the financial advantage."

The MPs on the energy and climate change committee concluded in March that "the commercial viability of small modular reactors remains unclear" but they were "an attractive proposition".

The government says its priority remains with large new reactors, but its study, due next year, would "address the remaining technical challenges and identify what benefits to the UK there could be from SMR deployment".

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