I suspect that the push for civilian SMRs is a disguised subsidy for the naval reactor programme. This is shortsighted because (1) for electricity renewables are cheaper than nuclear, and (2) large naval vessels are enormously vulnerable to drones.
Ukraine's success against Russia's Black Sea fleet proves this for surface vessels. Similarly, it is easy to imagine a swarm of small underwater drones detecting, tracking and trailing nuclear submarines.
The UK government's is more focussed on providing juicy contracts to large corporations than realistic preparations for the future.
> This is shortsighted because [...] electricity renewables are cheaper than nuclear
This is an oversimplification - Renewables are cheaper than nuclear, but they are also less reliable than nuclear in the sense that when the wind stops blowing, power stops being generated. Also if you include the cost of energy storage to survive a week or two without substantial wind, suddenly it's not the cheaper anymore.
A mixed nuclear + renewables grid would reduce the total cost because nuclear can provide a stable base load which isn't affected by seasonality. Modern plants can also ramp up/down to some extent to balance the overall system.
That's why you need an energy mix rather than just putting all your eggs in a single source.
Either you build enough nuclear to cover 95% of peak demand and essentially only run it a few weeks a year (because most of the time you have plenty of renewable supply) for terrible ROI or you need storage and peaker plants anyway. Nuclear energy is mostly interesting for cross subsidizing a military nuclear program by keeping relevant skills in domestic supply.
What good is a “base load” when the problem is peak demand. You’re saying nuclear gets to take the easy stuff and another industry can worry about peaker plants.
I suspect you need far ledd in peaker capacity - both GW and GWh - with a 100% wind than 100% nuclear if you spend the same amount on wind and nuclear.
nuclear energy still causes a lot of prompt heating
other forms of renewables could generate electricity while cooling the planet.
a super chimney (perhaps suspended with balloons) piercing the tropopause and carrying either air in open or closed loop fashion, or a "refrigerant" (not necessarily a harmful one, could just be moist air, or any other medium of thermal exchange, like a gravity assisted heat siphon) in a closed loop could generate power while cooling the planet, it would also be base load given the large temperature difference between surface level and tropopause (which persists day and night, summer and winter). Obviously this can also be used to desalinate sea water by freeze desalination.
as soon as such technology takes off and multiple blocs make use of such technology, they will probably even get into arguments about how long or what fraction of the time each nation state is allowed to generate power this way (arguing it was our Western excessive CO2 consumption to which we have to thank this excess heat availability, and India countering that we should take into account their proper share of excess CO2 due to the underground coal mines that have been burning uncontrollably for decades on end, etc...) to the point of nation states attacking each others superchimneys.
If you invest in battery and storage tech you'll get reliable storage long before the first "baseload nukes" start contributing to the grid.
Storage tech has been criminally underfunded and under-researched. There are many, many options. But because of poor investment decisions and lobbying from the usual suspects the tech is around twenty years behind where it could be.
First of, the UK are investing in battery storage, there’s already a rollout of grid-level battery systems across the country*.
None of them hold capacity for longer than 2 hours before they need to start discharging. In fact, the record breaking duration is 6 hours. This is great as a short buffer, but it’s not “storage”.
To put this in perspective, last year the UK went 2 weeks without any significant wind, so a 2 hour buffer is nothing. This is why Hydrogen is still being kept as an option for long term storage.
As an Ontario resident I wish they chose to build more CANDUs (which, AIUI, they are planning to do as well) rather than SMRs: our grid is in more need of 'bulk power', and SMRs are better suited to small grids (like the Canadian Maritimes) or small sites (like in Poland: replacing previous smaller scale coal plants).
> I suspect that the push for civilian SMRs is a disguised subsidy for the naval reactor programme
It absolutely isn’t. There is very little crossover between the RR SMR (which is 470 MWe, not really an ‘SMR’ by IAEA definition) and a submarine reactor core. Sub cores are smaller and optimised for different conditions. They’re vastly different tech. The teams at RR working on these are totally distinct with no crossover.
RR just got £9B for sub NSSS work. They don’t need a back door subsidy when they have a big cheque coming right through the front door!
If anything, UK govt is prioritising domestic technology, whether or not that’s the best from a purely economic point of view.
It is all about having the workforce able to deliver on the military ambitions.
This has been well known for a while, and western governments have started to say the quiet part out loud to justify the insanely large handouts required to build civillian nucleaar power.
It's dangerous to extrapolate much from the performance of the Russian Navy in the Black Sea. While Ukraine has had remarkable success in almost completely shutting down Russian naval activity in the Black Sea, it's not all due to the superiority of drones. Russian incompetence, both in naval strategy as well as operations is endemic, and the fate of the Moskva and other systems isn't indicative of a widespread vulnerability of surface vessels to drone systems. The Moskva was sunk with cruise missiles, primarily ones developed from Soviet era missiles (Kh-35). Much has been written about the materiel state of the Moskva, as well as operational decisions/inadequacies that lead to its demise.
Surface drones work well when air cover is limited/restricted. Tracking them via radar is difficult due to surface noise, but it can be done. Countering them isn't an impossible task either, it, like other threats are handled systematically. The Russians have a relatively slow OODA loop, and Ukraine has been very successful in leveraging their superiority.
Is the threat a universal one or limited to the UKR/Russian conflict? A little of both. We've seen where an unprepared ship can be easily damaged by a small boat laden with explosives (USS Cole). We've seen the Ukrainians shut down Russian activity in the Black Sea, even going so far as to down unwitting aircraft that didn't respect the threat. But militaries adapt, especially to proven threats. Witness how the West responded to the sinking of the Eilat in 1973. It developed countermeasures and weapon systems for the threat of cruise missiles, while simultaneously developing their own cruise missiles (Harpoon/Exocet/Otomat/Penguin).
Will undersea drones prove as concerning? I doubt small swarms of UUVs will proliferate like we've seen with FPV drones. Flying through the air is much much easier than operating in water. Propulsion, C2, and targeting is quite difficult underwater compared to UAVs. Both range and payload are a challenge, so I don't believe that a swarm of "small underwater drones" will be able to detect the quietest ships in the ocean any time soon, much less track and trail something that can travel at speeds above 40kts with ease.
Now will large UUVs have a role in future naval combat? Undoubtedly.
Ukraine's success proves that you need to actually have people guarding ships against intrusion. This is not a new lesson ever since the Raid on the Medway.
Continue generation is great if you have continues demand. The U.K. does not have that (especially if you include heating and travel which is currently mainly provided by gas)
The UK certainly does have continuous demand, our overall energy demand has rarely fallen below 25GW in the past couple of years. Right now gas makes up for much of that, the goal here is to replace gas with nuclear, using gas as baseload generation isn’t wise long term.
Storage is cheaper than peaking power which is why it’s common to add huge battery bank to solar power plants. It’s simply more profitable to add storage.
Net result renewables currently save you money until ~80% annual electricity supply. At which point adding more batteries and generation to cover overnight demand is cheaper than adding nuclear to the mix. In such a mix, Nuclear saves a little per kWh overnight and cost way more per kWh during the day, net result it’s more expensive as baseload. But, operating nuclear only at night drives up per kWh costs above storage.
Due to plant lifespans, new nuclear is already a poor investment which is why it’s rare, which then drives up construction costs. It’s a viscus cycle which ultimately dooms nuclear without massive subsidies which become hard to justify.
> Net result renewables currently save you money until ~80% annual electricity supply. At which point adding more batteries and generation to cover overnight demand is cheaper than adding nuclear to the mix.
Assume you mean more expensive than nuclear in the second point?
Agree with your point although it's about wind in the uk rather than solar, and about being able to last a few weeks if there is calm weather rather than a day without sun, which is when having a nuclear baseload makes sense.
> Assume you mean more expensive than nuclear in the second point?
No, but I clarified the comment. My point is when taken in isolation nighttime nuclear costs less than nighttime batteries on a near zero carbon grid, however the economics operate 24/7/365. Nuclear heavily favors 24/7 operations so gaining 3c/kWh at night while losing 6c/kWh during the day is a net loss. Operating only at night almost doubles nuclear’s cost per kWh so you’d lose money anyway.
> weeks if there is calm weather rather than a day without sun, which is when having a nuclear baseload makes sense.
If you don’t have enough energy for a few days randomly you need peaking power generation not baseload. Nuclear is really bad at ramping up to meet sudden shortfalls.
The scenario you described is one of the very few cases where hydrogen might make sense assuming all fossil fuel use is banned. Without that natural gas is going to win to prevent random outages every few decades.
And the prevalence of batteries in Texas means that they must be cost effective, because all grid assets in Texas are from private investors risking their own capital, and there is zero incentive for batteries except for their profit generative capacity.
> You can see on the map at the bottom of this page that almost all the batteries are in areas that already have high amounts of renewables:
It could be - but the battery investments map also align with the map below which shows that these states (Texas & California) are also states suffering from blackouts.
So while this could mean that storage is cheap, it could also mean 'Texas's mix and grid is unstable, particularly as it's not connected to the national grid, and this has opened the opportunity to profit from higher levels battery arbitrage that doesn't exist in a better balanced grid'
There's quite a lot of pricing data available for the energy market and it might be possible to approximate battery profitability by rerunning normal and long-tail history.
Which is what you would expect of a stat of "number of outages per state". If it's not normalized for land area, population, and all the other primary contributors to the total number of outages it's a useless stat. San Francisco has more people in it that the entire state of Wyoming.
Texas' power is also cheap, so to justify batteries they would have to not raise the cost of electricity that much.
The current cost of grid batteries is hidden, but it's not too hard to find out, and it is indeed quite cheap. But if there's no mechanism to get paid, ie ability to do time arbitrage in the energy market, then they do not get deployed.
Electricity market design and the ability of ISOs/PUCs/utilities to adapt to changing technology are bigger barriers to batteries than their price.
As for point one they are much less reliable because they are intermittent. I'm skeptical of how much cheaper renewables are. I haven't noticed energy prices declining recently. Correct me if i'm misinformed. I'm slightly confused by point 2. What are you saying, because soviet technology is getting sunk a lot we should stop bothering with having a navy?
Either way you are giving way to much credit to the power of the UK military industrial complex.
The UK is aiming for around 27GW of battery storage by 2030.
But it's not a simple picture. The grid needs to be expanded to distribute power from renewables more efficiently, batteries aren't the only storage option, and the concept is still too centralised.
A combination of distributed rooftop solar with domestic batteries, maybe local storage in substations, strategic national storage, and a mix of sources would be a more effective strategy than trying to park huge batteries around the country in the hope they'll be big enough.
The UK still has a post-war mindset around energy which doesn't make sense in the 21st century.
take a look at all the roofs next winter, if its anything like the other side of the canal, you'll see that the average roof coverage is substantially less than 1/3.
Wind & nuclear together. Britain already has large wind installations, since the sea to the east is quite shallow (it used to be a land bridge to Europe only 7,000-10,000 years ago). Back that up with nuclear providing the base load and you have reasonable energy security.
AFAIK the cost of nuclear is building it, but not running it. If you have enough nuclear to provide enough energy when there is no wind, then why do you need to build wind energy at all?
One immediate reason is its going to take another decade (conservatively) to even build one of these modular reactors. Another is the vast cost of nuclear compared to wind. We're deploying wind farms in large numbers right now (and even sometimes connecting them to the grid).
> its going to take another decade (conservatively) to even build one of these modular reactors.
So nuclear reactors can be built to supply the energy and power as the offshore wind farms get decommissioned. The rise and fall.
> Another is the vast cost of nuclear compared to wind.
What do you mean by cost? Capital expenditure per kW of nominal capacity, or by total energy generated? Plus should we consider other costs (backup, transmission, curtailment)?
A big part of the cost is design. China has built a lot of nuclear capacity at a low cost by essentially copying and pasting the same design, something that should be even easier with SMRs.
The cost of nuclear is two fold - government bureaucracy, and the lack of commercialization due to decades of misinformation from the eco-groups.
The plans just to build a tunnel under the Thames in the UK in 2025 is over 2 million pages at the moment, imagine what it is for the Sizewell C reactor - the environmental assessment on its own was 44,000 pages.
SMRs are a good middle ground because they can be commercialized and cost can be driven down once the government gets out of the way.
Yeh it probably is expensive - but we currently have no other way (other than gas) to cover the low-wind/sun periods; while there are times when the UK can almost run purely off wind, there are other periods where we get ~5% of that wind energy for a week or so; the battery storage is nowhere near useful for that.
They're right, though. Doing both is dumb. The alternative to renewables + storage is nuclear + storage, with the nuclear + storage having the advantage of the storage capacity needed being more predictable and a bit smaller, but with the massive disadvantage of the nuclear being extremely expensive and slow to build. But building enough nuclear plants to do what you're proposing, and then turning them off most of the time to get energy from the renewable plants you're also building, and only drawing from them unpredictably, is objectively the worst option.
Running existing plants is about the cost of gas - building new ones is extraordinarily expensive and is something like 3x or 4x the cost of other options, even after adjusting for nuclear’s much better capacity factor.
Please no more of Stop Sizewell C's Alison Downes a.k.a. (Moira) Alison Reynolds [0] & [1], who also happens to be one of the directors of the Greenpeace Environmental Trust [2].
> That’s why France had to raise the price because even with subsidies they couldn’t cover the costs
I'm not quite sure what you meant by this. By France did you mean EDF? And which power station are you referring to?
> I'm not quite sure what you meant by this. By France did you mean EDF? And which power station are you referring to?
I am not sure either. But they keep increasing the proposed subsidies for the EPR2 program, and they still haven't been able to pass them.
The French government just fell due to being underwater while being completely unable to handle it. A massive handout of tax money to the nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!
Hydrogen is the worst possible fuel. It's the least dense material in existence so you need a ton of it. It has to be made from either cracking polluting materials, or using a huge amount of electricity. It is really difficult to store and really flammable.
Nuclear is endless clean energy. Why do people like you keep ruining everything? If it wasn't for you, we'd have had full nuclear by 1980. No oil problems, no terrorist states, no dubai.
This would be green hydrogen. Sure, it has low density, but underground storage is pretty cheap at scale. Yes, it's flammable, but that can be handled, and is handled routinely -- the world currently produces and consumes 700 cubic kilometers (at STP) of hydrogen per year.
The huge advantage of hydrogen here is that a gas turbine power plant might cost $600/kW, a tiny fraction of the cost of a nuclear power plant. So if you have a need for a backup plant whose cost will be dominated by amortization of its fixed cost, hydrogen beats nuclear.
Almost all of Europe has stopped buying Russian gas? The exception being nuclear powered France. [1]
You also do know that we despite 19 sanctions packages still haven’t been able to sanction the Russian nuclear industry? We’re just too dependent on it.
As usual the answer is likely to be a combination of energy sources. It's not wind and solar (+storage) OR nuclear, it's wind and solar (+storage) AND nuclear (and of course other energy sources when appropriate).
But SMRs address the capex costs by reducing time and resources needed to provision them. The "M" stands for "modular" after all, ie components can be built offsite and imported, and capacity can be added incrementally.
If SMRs are cheap enough to act as backup to wind and solar, they are cheap enough to displace wind and solar entirely. And the contrapositive as well: if SMRs are not cheap enough to displace solar and wind, they aren't cheap enough to act as backup. The scenario where it's just a backup never arises in cost minimized solutions.
> If SMRs are cheap enough to act as backup to wind and solar, they are cheap enough to displace wind and solar entirely.
That doesn't follow necessarily. Wind & solar being the most cost effective doesn't mean you remove all backups just because they aren't as cost effective.
Its the other way around. If you have sufficient nuclear to act as a backup, then you have sufficient that you do not need the wind and solar in addition.
My point still stands though given that I specifically did not exclude any scenario. It makes more sense to optimize when you include all energy sources. It's still possible some sources won't end up in the final solution and that's fine.
If taking that step, why charge the batteries with extremely expensive nuclear powered electricity rather than cheap renewables?
It is done when moving electricity around when the grid is strained. Buy expensive electricity and sell it at even higher prices. But that is a vanishly tiny portion of the demand.
What is needed is an alternative storage that minimizes capex, even if that means operating at lower round trip efficiency. Hydrogen or ultra low capex thermal storage.
One advantage nuclear may have in the UK is in the per-Megawatt planning applications required, purely by the energy generation being more concentrated. Of course, while people hate wind turbines and solar panels, they _really_ hate nuclear, but this can mean nuclear has some chance of getting special permits from central government.
Another potential advantage is building energy generation closer to where it is needed as Britain is unable to build good interconnection infrastructure. I think this doesn’t actually happen so much – the main places you need power are where there are people, which is bad in the ‘people _really_ hate nuclear’ front, and regulators are very conservative and more wary the more people live nearby.
Wind+batteries is a bit viable (and helps with interconnect too in that if you can max out interconnect utilization by transferring energy from generation to storage near usage even when there is no immediate demand, you can move more energy with a given interconnect per day than if you only used it to directly move energy from generators to users) but estimates of battery storage required still seem potentially prohibitively high.
The general public don't understand nuclear. And we can thank CND, Greenpeace, and the mainstream press of the 60s onwards for regurgitating their misinformation and poor science as fact.
Modern designs are effectively melt-down proof. Nuclear waste storage is also hilariously funny. People understand not to tread on a railway line or get electrocuted and die, but somehow have a problem with burying waste at the bottom of a sealed mine in a geologically safe area many miles from the nearest village or town (never a city) in containers that have been tested to literal destruction is somehow a problem.
The sad irony is these eco-people's opposition to nuclear for decades has resulted in gigatons of CO2 from coal/oil/gas power stations.
People have a problem with spent fuels sitting in pools for decades, as happens in Sellafield.
"Originally constructed in the 1940s, 50s and 60s these facilities - two ponds and two concrete silos - no longer meet the safety requirements that are required today and present some of the most difficult decommissioning challenges - not just in the UK - but in the world."
The industry does not have a good reputation, and it only has itself to blame for that.
Wind and solar are extremely unstable. Spain had a country-wide blackout earlier this year because of reactors being off. Days with peak solar and wind (heavily subsidized) made nuclear not viable. But you need a stable source to keep the grid from collapsing (and not fry appliances), like nuclear or hydro. It's like both a pace-maker and a goakeeper.
So you need a mix. Small reactors fix the problem of NIMBY caused by decades of fearmongering (now slowly reversing).
Depends on over provision then. If lowest demand in the grid is 20GW, average 30GW highest demand is 50GW then you need to be able to generate 50GW, despite nuclear costs only being specced assuming they can always find 20GW of customers.
It’s the same problem as wind has where demand and supply are variable.
Nuclear cant scale up in an affordable cost as the first GW is amortised over 8,760 hours a year, but the top 10GW is only needed 50 hours a year. If it’s £8760 to generate 10GW for a year, that means you have to spend £43,800 to be able to cope with a peak of 50GW, but the average demand of 30GW means the average cost is £14,600 - 65% more than the average “base load”
True, but for most places you'll now be dependent on some other country selling you uranium. Which is something many countries are now factoring in into these kind of decisions.
Nuclear is surprisingly expensive and solar/wind/storage is surprisingly cheap. Even solar in the UK has better economics than nuclear, and it has no shortage of wind.
The outcome of Contracts for Difference (CfD) Allocation Round 6 suggests wind isn't cheap compared to wholesale electricity prices in the UK, which are already one of the highest in the world. The maths is quite simple.
And that doesn't include curtailment costs, which are not insignificant.
The average strike price for offshore wind in AR6 came in at £59.90/MWh. That's pretty cheap, and much cheaper than any new nuclear. Hinkley Point C's strike price is £92.50/MWh. (note: strike prices are always quoted based on 2012 currency, and get adjusted for inflation)
You can't really compare strike prices to spot prices on the wholesale market precisely because there's so much supply under CfD contracts, which distorts the wholesale market. When supply is abundant, the wholesale price plummets and even goes negative, yet suppliers still want to generate because they get the CfD price. When supply is constrained (eg: cold snaps in winter with little wind), the spot price can surge to £1000/MWh.
In 2024 money offshore was £102 offshore, onshore £89. AR7 estimates are >10% higher. Those prices were not high enough for Hornsea 4, who cancelled the contract (with a big write down for the entire project) after being awarded it.
Yes, like I said, UK CfD strike prices (both nuclear and wind) are always quoted in 2012 prices.
But even adjusting for inflation, offshore wind's £59.90 is a fraction of the retail price that UK consumers and most businesses pay for electricity. There's plenty of margin left for the middlemen (regulator, grid operator, distribution network operator, electricity retailer, etc).
... and Hinkley Point C's £92.50 is £133.79 today, and could be £160+ by the time it actually starts generating in (maybe?) 2031.
Nuclear and security, that’s a good one especially nowadays when companies tend to connect everything to the internet and drone wars are a thing since the war in Ukraine.
Nuclear is an industry that strangled itself with red tape and harmful PR, making every project fiendishly expensive and take so many decades that cost-of-capital costs are insane.
I don't think it will ever again beat solar+wind+battery for grid scale carbon-free power pricing.
Even if it had never had those issues, nuclear power would still be the textbook example of a fragile system - capital-intensive, centralized projects that can be shut down by disruption to fuel shipments halfway round the world, droughts in the cooling system's water sources, or any of a dozen unions of specialized workers going on strike. Add to that iteration cycles measured in decades instead of years and it's hard to imagine how Nuclear could ever even close the gap, let alone pull ahead.
I have a theory that smart financiers avoid nuclear because getting a new version done on time and under budget is so damn hard, and smart physicists gravitate to nuclear for the same reason. I wish the nuclear-curious factions would pivot to a project Orion style endeavor instead of powering a UK hamlet sometime in the 2030s. Now there's something insanely difficult and likely to fail that I wouldn't mind my tax dollars being spent on.
Capitalism is extremely poor at "fragile systems", and for whatever reason (water under the bride now) the nuclear industry never made the move to smaller modular systems - even for large installations (think a reactor hall with 20 small cores rather than a single large core).
Even this project sounds like a custom on-site build, although at the moment it is still vapourware.
> I don't think it will ever again beat solar+wind+battery for grid scale carbon-free power pricing.
The problem the UK has is their climate: Northerly enough that solar makes 5x as much power in the summer as it does in the winter, and much more demand for heating in the winter than cooling in the summer.
Batteries are fine for storing solar in the day and using it at night - but much less good for summer-to-winter storage. And the UK isn't exactly eager to start flooding desolate valleys for pumped storage reservoirs either.
Oh, and they don't just need to decarbonise their existing electricity output - they also need to greatly increase their electricity output to hit their goals on EV and heat pump adoption; and they need to lower electricity prices too.
This was my impression as well, both watching Smarter Every Day and visiting a nuclear power plant myself and taking the tour.
Yes, safety is important, but I think they're far into diminishing returns territory, and we have to take the penalty in both energy cost and security.
I think it was mostly caused by fear about nuclear Armageddon during the cold war - it's hard to feel like the world could end at any second due to nuclear bombs while also feeling grateful for nuclear electricity generation. Would be even if there was no overlap between military and civilian nuclear industries, which of course there is.
Well, at least for Germany it was the actual nuclear fallout over large areas of the country after Chernobyl. Which is btw still measurable today. [1] That's a pretty scary thing to happen to you and one just has to accept that these are the actual lived experiences of people that form their opinions.
Radiation detectors can detect very low levels of radiation (far below any measurable health effects, for instance), so claiming we can still detect fallout from Chernobyl doesn't really say anything.
> In the last years values of up to several thousand becquerel per kilogram were measured in wild game and certain edible mushrooms. In Germany it is not permitted to market food with more than 600 becquerel caesium-137 per kilogram.
Producing power by the mid 2030s? Isn't the entire point of SMRs that they are effectively a complete package and it takes very little effort to ship them out and getting them to produce power. Or is this just a pipe-dream we were sold?
Like, I imagined these things being compact enough to be shipped to the outskirts of towns and producing power. Afterall, they are from the same technology that was powering nuclear subs, right?
This Rolls Royce design isn't all that "small." A RR SMR design is a 470MWe PWR. About half the size of a typical PWR reactor. Fukushima Daiichi Unit 1 was 460MWe. Calling this an "SMR" is a stretch, likely for PR purposes.
It's a rather conventional design, low enriched fuel, no exotic coolants. There is a paper on it at NRC[1]. And they've never built one, so if they get it running by the 2030's they'll be doing pretty well for a Western company.
The reactor is still to be developed by Rolls Royce, which is hidden in mid article. The don't have plans, not even a working prototype yet, so expect delays to at least the mid 2040s.
One has to expect any promise of future nuclear to have the optimism turned up to 11, right to the limit of plausibility. The reality will inevitably disappoint.
> Isn't the entire point of SMRs that they are effectively a complete package and it takes very little effort to ship them out and getting them to produce power.
That's the point if / when we have actually working SMRs, with production lines set up. But the limited development of small civilian reactors before the 80s and the 3 decades freeze on most things nuclear means SMRs are only just getting out of research status (e.g. in the US only NuScale's VOYGR are currently certified).
This has kind of been the problem with SMRs; they sound great, but as you develop them, they get less and less small and modular. These are 470MWe. Coincidentally, the (very old) 'normal' MAGNOX reactors which used to operate at this site were 490MWe; in their day they were considered quite large.
> Afterall, they are from the same technology that was powering nuclear subs, right?
That was just for the news headlines, nuclear isn't and never has been, "practical". Look on the bright side, so much taxpayer money will go into this, it's probably going to make someone richer.
> "The old nuclear power plant at Wylfa was switched off in 2015"
Tangentially—this is a brownfield site, where there once was an early generation of nuclear fission reactor, cooled by CO2 gas. Here's a brief description of what those machines looked like (not this exact one):
I believe the more technologically advanced we live the more energy we will use. Travel requires energy, ai models require energy, healthy food requires energy
The cheaper and more abundant we can make electricity, the faster we can reap the benefits of new technology
imo nuclear is an important part to have abundant energy at all times
This is a rare moment of sanity in energy policy. It’s not about wind vs nuclear. We (the whole world) need everything we’ve got. SMRs have the potential to move nuclear out of its mainframe era.
Remember iPhones would cost ~$billions each too if you only made 12 of them.
That's not what we're seeing with nuclear power though. At least so far. Counterintuitively it seems to get more expensive the more you build of the same design: [1]
> Among the surprising findings in the study, which covered 50 years of U.S. nuclear power plant construction data, was that, contrary to expectations, building subsequent plants based on an existing design actually costs more, not less, than building the initial plant.
Mass production has never been tried before for nuclear so those 50 years don’t tell us much about the possibilities for the next 50 years. They built multiple mainframes of the same design too, but the scale remained tiny and so the costs remained high.
We desperately need regional pricing. If we had that, manufacturers and data centres would be able to move to places like this, or to scotland, and get almost free electricity.
And then electricity producers would have a huge incentive to build generation in places where electricity is actually used. And NIMBYs would be told to fuck off, because letting someone build an energy source would make your electricity cheap.
Roughly: the demand is about 33-35GW. That’s projected to become 50GW by 2050 as transportation and home heating become electrified. So that’s the puck we’re skating towards.
Nuclear supplies a constant 10% of the demand today (more, if you count imports from France). The goal is to power 20% of the 50GW demand through nuclear. If it’s cheap, even more. Each of these Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) generates 470MW, so we’d need about 20 of them.
The plan is to set up a factory near Sheffield and produce the reactor parts like IKEA, so they can be assembled on site. The hope is that manufacturing and assembling the same product repeatedly makes people more efficient. That’s the main problem with nuclear - over budget and delays - that SMRs aim to fix.
I’m glad the UK is taking electrification seriously, and is investing in domestic industry that will hopefully export reactors if it’s successful. Some folks might look at the estimated date of completion (2035) and get discouraged, but I wouldn’t. The best time to plant this tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
Misleading how? That’s precisely how SMRs differ from traditional plants - they’re manufactured in a factory instead of being constructed on-site. That’s exactly like the difference between IKEA and constructing furniture from scratch using blocks of wood.
That was the SMR dream, but it largely hasn't worked out, for various reasons. Most 'SMR' designs have grown to suspiciously close to er, normal nuclear reactors.
Anglesey is beautiful[0]. My ancestors came from there and I used to holiday there as a child. Today it is somewhat blighted by those ugly and noisy turbines[1]. I am in favor of this if it reduces the number of onshore turbines on the island.
I suspect that the push for civilian SMRs is a disguised subsidy for the naval reactor programme. This is shortsighted because (1) for electricity renewables are cheaper than nuclear, and (2) large naval vessels are enormously vulnerable to drones.
Ukraine's success against Russia's Black Sea fleet proves this for surface vessels. Similarly, it is easy to imagine a swarm of small underwater drones detecting, tracking and trailing nuclear submarines.
The UK government's is more focussed on providing juicy contracts to large corporations than realistic preparations for the future.
> This is shortsighted because [...] electricity renewables are cheaper than nuclear
This is an oversimplification - Renewables are cheaper than nuclear, but they are also less reliable than nuclear in the sense that when the wind stops blowing, power stops being generated. Also if you include the cost of energy storage to survive a week or two without substantial wind, suddenly it's not the cheaper anymore.
A mixed nuclear + renewables grid would reduce the total cost because nuclear can provide a stable base load which isn't affected by seasonality. Modern plants can also ramp up/down to some extent to balance the overall system.
That's why you need an energy mix rather than just putting all your eggs in a single source.
Either you build enough nuclear to cover 95% of peak demand and essentially only run it a few weeks a year (because most of the time you have plenty of renewable supply) for terrible ROI or you need storage and peaker plants anyway. Nuclear energy is mostly interesting for cross subsidizing a military nuclear program by keeping relevant skills in domestic supply.
What good is a “base load” when the problem is peak demand. You’re saying nuclear gets to take the easy stuff and another industry can worry about peaker plants.
I suspect you need far ledd in peaker capacity - both GW and GWh - with a 100% wind than 100% nuclear if you spend the same amount on wind and nuclear.
For civilian use I believe this has proven unnecessary (assuming mix of wind, solar, etc) plus battery and other storage
Still seems like a worthwhile pursuit though
nuclear energy still causes a lot of prompt heating
other forms of renewables could generate electricity while cooling the planet.
a super chimney (perhaps suspended with balloons) piercing the tropopause and carrying either air in open or closed loop fashion, or a "refrigerant" (not necessarily a harmful one, could just be moist air, or any other medium of thermal exchange, like a gravity assisted heat siphon) in a closed loop could generate power while cooling the planet, it would also be base load given the large temperature difference between surface level and tropopause (which persists day and night, summer and winter). Obviously this can also be used to desalinate sea water by freeze desalination.
as soon as such technology takes off and multiple blocs make use of such technology, they will probably even get into arguments about how long or what fraction of the time each nation state is allowed to generate power this way (arguing it was our Western excessive CO2 consumption to which we have to thank this excess heat availability, and India countering that we should take into account their proper share of excess CO2 due to the underground coal mines that have been burning uncontrollably for decades on end, etc...) to the point of nation states attacking each others superchimneys.
If you invest in battery and storage tech you'll get reliable storage long before the first "baseload nukes" start contributing to the grid.
Storage tech has been criminally underfunded and under-researched. There are many, many options. But because of poor investment decisions and lobbying from the usual suspects the tech is around twenty years behind where it could be.
That’s simply not true, or at least not today.
First of, the UK are investing in battery storage, there’s already a rollout of grid-level battery systems across the country*.
None of them hold capacity for longer than 2 hours before they need to start discharging. In fact, the record breaking duration is 6 hours. This is great as a short buffer, but it’s not “storage”.
To put this in perspective, last year the UK went 2 weeks without any significant wind, so a 2 hour buffer is nothing. This is why Hydrogen is still being kept as an option for long term storage.
https://stateraenergy.co.uk/projects/thurrock-storage
https://rhomotion.com/news/longest-duration-battery-energy-s...
The ratio between GW and GWh is always an optimization of the fixed costs vs potential profit.
A 4 hour battery can run at 50% for 8 hours or 25% for 16 hours.
The determining factor is what the market needs.
> I suspect that the push for civilian SMRs is a disguised subsidy for the naval reactor programme.
Ontario, Canada is building a bunch of BWRX-300 SMRs and don't really have a desire for a naval reactor programme:
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/carney-ford-announce-...
* https://www.opg.com/projects-services/projects/nuclear/smr/d...
* https://www.gevernova.com/news/press-releases/ge-vernova-hit...
Canada is currently looking at new submarines, and the final two candidates are both SSKs (and not nuclear SSNs):
* https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2025/08/28/canada-shortlis...
* https://www.canada.ca/en/public-services-procurement/news/20...
As an Ontario resident I wish they chose to build more CANDUs (which, AIUI, they are planning to do as well) rather than SMRs: our grid is in more need of 'bulk power', and SMRs are better suited to small grids (like the Canadian Maritimes) or small sites (like in Poland: replacing previous smaller scale coal plants).
> I suspect that the push for civilian SMRs is a disguised subsidy for the naval reactor programme
It absolutely isn’t. There is very little crossover between the RR SMR (which is 470 MWe, not really an ‘SMR’ by IAEA definition) and a submarine reactor core. Sub cores are smaller and optimised for different conditions. They’re vastly different tech. The teams at RR working on these are totally distinct with no crossover.
RR just got £9B for sub NSSS work. They don’t need a back door subsidy when they have a big cheque coming right through the front door!
If anything, UK govt is prioritising domestic technology, whether or not that’s the best from a purely economic point of view.
It is all about having the workforce able to deliver on the military ambitions.
This has been well known for a while, and western governments have started to say the quiet part out loud to justify the insanely large handouts required to build civillian nucleaar power.
https://theconversation.com/military-interests-are-pushing-n...
> Similarly, it is easy to imagine a swarm of small underwater drones detecting, tracking and trailing nuclear submarines.
Those are called torpedoes.
It’s way cheaper to build a drone that doesn’t need to travel quickly or carry huge amount high explosives.
How is a slow, lightly armed drone going to damage a nuclear submarine that can both outrun and outdive it?
The drone’s goal is to locate it, you’d then send something else to destroy it if you’re in an actual war.
America uses surface buoy’s to similar effect, going underwater would allow drones to be harder to detect. https://idstch.com/military/navy/navy-researching-new-buoy-t...
Of note you don’t necessarily need to be able to track a sub everywhere, an invisible underwater “fence” may be good enough.
It's dangerous to extrapolate much from the performance of the Russian Navy in the Black Sea. While Ukraine has had remarkable success in almost completely shutting down Russian naval activity in the Black Sea, it's not all due to the superiority of drones. Russian incompetence, both in naval strategy as well as operations is endemic, and the fate of the Moskva and other systems isn't indicative of a widespread vulnerability of surface vessels to drone systems. The Moskva was sunk with cruise missiles, primarily ones developed from Soviet era missiles (Kh-35). Much has been written about the materiel state of the Moskva, as well as operational decisions/inadequacies that lead to its demise.
Surface drones work well when air cover is limited/restricted. Tracking them via radar is difficult due to surface noise, but it can be done. Countering them isn't an impossible task either, it, like other threats are handled systematically. The Russians have a relatively slow OODA loop, and Ukraine has been very successful in leveraging their superiority.
Is the threat a universal one or limited to the UKR/Russian conflict? A little of both. We've seen where an unprepared ship can be easily damaged by a small boat laden with explosives (USS Cole). We've seen the Ukrainians shut down Russian activity in the Black Sea, even going so far as to down unwitting aircraft that didn't respect the threat. But militaries adapt, especially to proven threats. Witness how the West responded to the sinking of the Eilat in 1973. It developed countermeasures and weapon systems for the threat of cruise missiles, while simultaneously developing their own cruise missiles (Harpoon/Exocet/Otomat/Penguin).
Will undersea drones prove as concerning? I doubt small swarms of UUVs will proliferate like we've seen with FPV drones. Flying through the air is much much easier than operating in water. Propulsion, C2, and targeting is quite difficult underwater compared to UAVs. Both range and payload are a challenge, so I don't believe that a swarm of "small underwater drones" will be able to detect the quietest ships in the ocean any time soon, much less track and trail something that can travel at speeds above 40kts with ease.
Now will large UUVs have a role in future naval combat? Undoubtedly.
Ukraine's success proves that you need to actually have people guarding ships against intrusion. This is not a new lesson ever since the Raid on the Medway.
> electricity renewables are cheaper than nuclear
Are they still if you include storage, vs. nuclear's continuous generation?
Continue generation is great if you have continues demand. The U.K. does not have that (especially if you include heating and travel which is currently mainly provided by gas)
That’s quite an odd statement to make.
The UK certainly does have continuous demand, our overall energy demand has rarely fallen below 25GW in the past couple of years. Right now gas makes up for much of that, the goal here is to replace gas with nuclear, using gas as baseload generation isn’t wise long term.
Source: https://grid.iamkate.com/
Our demand varies from 25 to 45GW
Saying “nuclear can handle the easy part” doesn’t help. You still need 20GW of extra capacity to cope.
It’s like saying “wind can handle the bulk of the capacity you just need to top up the rest”.
It would also provide a steady source of tritium for upkeeping nuclear weapons
This: nuclear energy is a subsidy for nuclear weapons.
The Royal Navy only uses nuclear power for submarines, at least for now (unlike USN which uses it for big aircraft carriers)
Making the two new UK aircraft carriers dependent on natural gas has to be one of the worst military procurement decisions of the modern era.
Its fuelled with diesel, not natural gas. And all carriers need refuel at some point for their embarked aircraft.
Renewables are cheap but storage isn't.
Storage is cheaper than peaking power which is why it’s common to add huge battery bank to solar power plants. It’s simply more profitable to add storage.
Net result renewables currently save you money until ~80% annual electricity supply. At which point adding more batteries and generation to cover overnight demand is cheaper than adding nuclear to the mix. In such a mix, Nuclear saves a little per kWh overnight and cost way more per kWh during the day, net result it’s more expensive as baseload. But, operating nuclear only at night drives up per kWh costs above storage.
Due to plant lifespans, new nuclear is already a poor investment which is why it’s rare, which then drives up construction costs. It’s a viscus cycle which ultimately dooms nuclear without massive subsidies which become hard to justify.
> Net result renewables currently save you money until ~80% annual electricity supply. At which point adding more batteries and generation to cover overnight demand is cheaper than adding nuclear to the mix.
Assume you mean more expensive than nuclear in the second point?
Agree with your point although it's about wind in the uk rather than solar, and about being able to last a few weeks if there is calm weather rather than a day without sun, which is when having a nuclear baseload makes sense.
> Assume you mean more expensive than nuclear in the second point?
No, but I clarified the comment. My point is when taken in isolation nighttime nuclear costs less than nighttime batteries on a near zero carbon grid, however the economics operate 24/7/365. Nuclear heavily favors 24/7 operations so gaining 3c/kWh at night while losing 6c/kWh during the day is a net loss. Operating only at night almost doubles nuclear’s cost per kWh so you’d lose money anyway.
> weeks if there is calm weather rather than a day without sun, which is when having a nuclear baseload makes sense.
If you don’t have enough energy for a few days randomly you need peaking power generation not baseload. Nuclear is really bad at ramping up to meet sudden shortfalls.
The scenario you described is one of the very few cases where hydrogen might make sense assuming all fossil fuel use is banned. Without that natural gas is going to win to prevent random outages every few decades.
In 2025 storage is cheap too, it's just that there's no need for it until you already have a large amount of renewables.
2025 is the year that storage is really being deployed in a serious manner in the US, more than 18GW most likely:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65964
You can see on the map at the bottom of this page that almost all the batteries are in areas that already have high amounts of renewables:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586
And the prevalence of batteries in Texas means that they must be cost effective, because all grid assets in Texas are from private investors risking their own capital, and there is zero incentive for batteries except for their profit generative capacity.
> You can see on the map at the bottom of this page that almost all the batteries are in areas that already have high amounts of renewables:
It could be - but the battery investments map also align with the map below which shows that these states (Texas & California) are also states suffering from blackouts.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/power-outag...
So while this could mean that storage is cheap, it could also mean 'Texas's mix and grid is unstable, particularly as it's not connected to the national grid, and this has opened the opportunity to profit from higher levels battery arbitrage that doesn't exist in a better balanced grid'
There's quite a lot of pricing data available for the energy market and it might be possible to approximate battery profitability by rerunning normal and long-tail history.
See https://www.ercot.com/mktinfo/prices and https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards and https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/energystoragere... for example.
That looks to be a population map:
https://xkcd.com/1138/
Which is what you would expect of a stat of "number of outages per state". If it's not normalized for land area, population, and all the other primary contributors to the total number of outages it's a useless stat. San Francisco has more people in it that the entire state of Wyoming.
Texas' power is also cheap, so to justify batteries they would have to not raise the cost of electricity that much.
The current cost of grid batteries is hidden, but it's not too hard to find out, and it is indeed quite cheap. But if there's no mechanism to get paid, ie ability to do time arbitrage in the energy market, then they do not get deployed.
Electricity market design and the ability of ISOs/PUCs/utilities to adapt to changing technology are bigger barriers to batteries than their price.
...just quite yet.
Russia's naval prowess have always been a joke so you can't make too many conclusions.
As for point one they are much less reliable because they are intermittent. I'm skeptical of how much cheaper renewables are. I haven't noticed energy prices declining recently. Correct me if i'm misinformed. I'm slightly confused by point 2. What are you saying, because soviet technology is getting sunk a lot we should stop bothering with having a navy?
Either way you are giving way to much credit to the power of the UK military industrial complex.
Solar power is very cheap and still getting cheaper:
https://www.statista.com/chart/35117/levelized-cost-of-energ...
Solar power doesn't work well in the UK in winter, with 1/3 of the energy output of summer months.
Taking the limit of free solar power, what would the storage requirements look like for the UK?
The UK is aiming for around 27GW of battery storage by 2030.
But it's not a simple picture. The grid needs to be expanded to distribute power from renewables more efficiently, batteries aren't the only storage option, and the concept is still too centralised.
A combination of distributed rooftop solar with domestic batteries, maybe local storage in substations, strategic national storage, and a mix of sources would be a more effective strategy than trying to park huge batteries around the country in the hope they'll be big enough.
The UK still has a post-war mindset around energy which doesn't make sense in the 21st century.
> The UK is aiming for around 27GW of battery storage by 2030.
How many GWh? Citation please.
I’m not OP but: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-the-uk-plans-to-rea...
It’s either 27 or 27GW they are installing sorry.
27GW for an hour or for a week?
There’s a massive difference.
take a look at all the roofs next winter, if its anything like the other side of the canal, you'll see that the average roof coverage is substantially less than 1/3.
Great news. Lets hope this is just the start.
The whole of Europe needs to get on with energy security and Britain can and should be a leader here, next to Netherlands, Sweden and France.
The question is what’s better value for money, wind and solar (potentially with storage when required), or nuclear.
Wind & nuclear together. Britain already has large wind installations, since the sea to the east is quite shallow (it used to be a land bridge to Europe only 7,000-10,000 years ago). Back that up with nuclear providing the base load and you have reasonable energy security.
> it used to be a land bridge to Europe only 7,000-10,000 years ago)
Doggerland. I've always found its geography and the idea that people lived there fascinating.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland
Fisherman frequently dredge up stone age (or earlier) implements from there.
AFAIK the cost of nuclear is building it, but not running it. If you have enough nuclear to provide enough energy when there is no wind, then why do you need to build wind energy at all?
One immediate reason is its going to take another decade (conservatively) to even build one of these modular reactors. Another is the vast cost of nuclear compared to wind. We're deploying wind farms in large numbers right now (and even sometimes connecting them to the grid).
> its going to take another decade (conservatively) to even build one of these modular reactors.
So nuclear reactors can be built to supply the energy and power as the offshore wind farms get decommissioned. The rise and fall.
> Another is the vast cost of nuclear compared to wind.
What do you mean by cost? Capital expenditure per kW of nominal capacity, or by total energy generated? Plus should we consider other costs (backup, transmission, curtailment)?
A big part of the cost is design. China has built a lot of nuclear capacity at a low cost by essentially copying and pasting the same design, something that should be even easier with SMRs.
One option is to build enough nuclear to cover your minimum demand, and enough wind/solar/storage to cover the rest.
Why not just build the wind/solar/storage to cover it all.
If that’s too expensive why not just build enough nuclear to cover it all.
The cost of nuclear is two fold - government bureaucracy, and the lack of commercialization due to decades of misinformation from the eco-groups.
The plans just to build a tunnel under the Thames in the UK in 2025 is over 2 million pages at the moment, imagine what it is for the Sizewell C reactor - the environmental assessment on its own was 44,000 pages.
SMRs are a good middle ground because they can be commercialized and cost can be driven down once the government gets out of the way.
> The cost of nuclear is two fold - government bureaucracy, and the lack of commercialization due to decades of misinformation from the eco-groups.
The misinformation hasn’t occurred in a vacuum. The nuclear industry has been far from transparent in how it operates.
We could probably do with a small amount of storage as we do have days where we pay for turbines to /not/ generate.
> Back that up with nuclear providing the base load and you have reasonable energy security.
So you’re saying that we should turn off the nuclear plant?
What do we calculate? A generous 50% capacity factor?
The new built nuclear power now costs ~40 cents/kWh.
It just becomes ridiculously expensive when real world constraints are added.
Yeh it probably is expensive - but we currently have no other way (other than gas) to cover the low-wind/sun periods; while there are times when the UK can almost run purely off wind, there are other periods where we get ~5% of that wind energy for a week or so; the battery storage is nowhere near useful for that.
They're right, though. Doing both is dumb. The alternative to renewables + storage is nuclear + storage, with the nuclear + storage having the advantage of the storage capacity needed being more predictable and a bit smaller, but with the massive disadvantage of the nuclear being extremely expensive and slow to build. But building enough nuclear plants to do what you're proposing, and then turning them off most of the time to get energy from the renewable plants you're also building, and only drawing from them unpredictably, is objectively the worst option.
It's so funny every time we build a nuclear plant we say 'ooooh expensive' then by the time it's built it turns out it's ~ at the cost of gas.
Running existing plants is about the cost of gas - building new ones is extraordinarily expensive and is something like 3x or 4x the cost of other options, even after adjusting for nuclear’s much better capacity factor.
Yeah, let‘s ignore that construction costs
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cev03wer0p2o
And the subsidies needed to keep the price "low".
That’s why France had to raise the price because even with subsidies they couldn’t cover the costs
Please no more of Stop Sizewell C's Alison Downes a.k.a. (Moira) Alison Reynolds [0] & [1], who also happens to be one of the directors of the Greenpeace Environmental Trust [2].
> That’s why France had to raise the price because even with subsidies they couldn’t cover the costs
I'm not quite sure what you meant by this. By France did you mean EDF? And which power station are you referring to?
[0] https://stopsizewellc.org/core/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/TE... page 5
[1] https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/o...
[2] https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/o...
> I'm not quite sure what you meant by this. By France did you mean EDF? And which power station are you referring to?
I am not sure either. But they keep increasing the proposed subsidies for the EPR2 program, and they still haven't been able to pass them.
The French government just fell due to being underwater while being completely unable to handle it. A massive handout of tax money to the nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!
Hydrogen or low capex thermal.
The UK has adequate salt formations for large scale storage of hydrogen.
Hydrogen is the worst possible fuel. It's the least dense material in existence so you need a ton of it. It has to be made from either cracking polluting materials, or using a huge amount of electricity. It is really difficult to store and really flammable.
Nuclear is endless clean energy. Why do people like you keep ruining everything? If it wasn't for you, we'd have had full nuclear by 1980. No oil problems, no terrorist states, no dubai.
> Nuclear is endless clean energy.
The UK hasn’t had any nuclear waste problems?
It might be the solution but pretending it’s perfect is how we got here.
This would be green hydrogen. Sure, it has low density, but underground storage is pretty cheap at scale. Yes, it's flammable, but that can be handled, and is handled routinely -- the world currently produces and consumes 700 cubic kilometers (at STP) of hydrogen per year.
The huge advantage of hydrogen here is that a gas turbine power plant might cost $600/kW, a tiny fraction of the cost of a nuclear power plant. So if you have a need for a backup plant whose cost will be dominated by amortization of its fixed cost, hydrogen beats nuclear.
The current "real world constraint" is purchasing gas from Russia.
Yeah, nuclear is better than that.
The thing Ive never quite understood is that the UK has no domestic supply of uranium.
Almost all of Europe has stopped buying Russian gas? The exception being nuclear powered France. [1]
You also do know that we despite 19 sanctions packages still haven’t been able to sanction the Russian nuclear industry? We’re just too dependent on it.
[1]: https://www.highnorthnews.com/en/eu-talks-tough-russian-lng-...
The French gas plants have been built to support renewables, France didn't have almost any gas plants prior 2010.
There's no sanctions on the Russian nuclear industry because it's a rounding error financially compared to gas or petrol.
As usual the answer is likely to be a combination of energy sources. It's not wind and solar (+storage) OR nuclear, it's wind and solar (+storage) AND nuclear (and of course other energy sources when appropriate).
The problem is that nuclear powers profile with fixed output and extremely high CAPEX costs is the opposite to what a modern grid needs.
How would you add an extremely expensive new built nuclear plant to this grid? Would you shut it down for days on end or try to run it as a peaker?
https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&...
But SMRs address the capex costs by reducing time and resources needed to provision them. The "M" stands for "modular" after all, ie components can be built offsite and imported, and capacity can be added incrementally.
Think 'agile', not 'waterfall'.
If SMRs are cheap enough to act as backup to wind and solar, they are cheap enough to displace wind and solar entirely. And the contrapositive as well: if SMRs are not cheap enough to displace solar and wind, they aren't cheap enough to act as backup. The scenario where it's just a backup never arises in cost minimized solutions.
> If SMRs are cheap enough to act as backup to wind and solar, they are cheap enough to displace wind and solar entirely.
That doesn't follow necessarily. Wind & solar being the most cost effective doesn't mean you remove all backups just because they aren't as cost effective.
Its the other way around. If you have sufficient nuclear to act as a backup, then you have sufficient that you do not need the wind and solar in addition.
That's South Australia, not the UK.
My point still stands though given that I specifically did not exclude any scenario. It makes more sense to optimize when you include all energy sources. It's still possible some sources won't end up in the final solution and that's fine.
Or add a load of batteries to the capex and redistribute the constant load?
If taking that step, why charge the batteries with extremely expensive nuclear powered electricity rather than cheap renewables?
It is done when moving electricity around when the grid is strained. Buy expensive electricity and sell it at even higher prices. But that is a vanishly tiny portion of the demand.
Because there is little solar in the 3 winter months, so you would need a lot more storage for solar then for nuclear.
What is needed is an alternative storage that minimizes capex, even if that means operating at lower round trip efficiency. Hydrogen or ultra low capex thermal storage.
I'll point to Standard Thermal again here.
https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/standard-thermal
One advantage nuclear may have in the UK is in the per-Megawatt planning applications required, purely by the energy generation being more concentrated. Of course, while people hate wind turbines and solar panels, they _really_ hate nuclear, but this can mean nuclear has some chance of getting special permits from central government.
Another potential advantage is building energy generation closer to where it is needed as Britain is unable to build good interconnection infrastructure. I think this doesn’t actually happen so much – the main places you need power are where there are people, which is bad in the ‘people _really_ hate nuclear’ front, and regulators are very conservative and more wary the more people live nearby.
Wind+batteries is a bit viable (and helps with interconnect too in that if you can max out interconnect utilization by transferring energy from generation to storage near usage even when there is no immediate demand, you can move more energy with a given interconnect per day than if you only used it to directly move energy from generators to users) but estimates of battery storage required still seem potentially prohibitively high.
> they _really_ hate nuclear
The general public don't understand nuclear. And we can thank CND, Greenpeace, and the mainstream press of the 60s onwards for regurgitating their misinformation and poor science as fact.
Modern designs are effectively melt-down proof. Nuclear waste storage is also hilariously funny. People understand not to tread on a railway line or get electrocuted and die, but somehow have a problem with burying waste at the bottom of a sealed mine in a geologically safe area many miles from the nearest village or town (never a city) in containers that have been tested to literal destruction is somehow a problem.
The sad irony is these eco-people's opposition to nuclear for decades has resulted in gigatons of CO2 from coal/oil/gas power stations.
People have a problem with spent fuels sitting in pools for decades, as happens in Sellafield.
"Originally constructed in the 1940s, 50s and 60s these facilities - two ponds and two concrete silos - no longer meet the safety requirements that are required today and present some of the most difficult decommissioning challenges - not just in the UK - but in the world."
The industry does not have a good reputation, and it only has itself to blame for that.
https://www.onr.org.uk/our-work/what-we-regulate/sellafield-...
Given UK wind capacity factors are not going to be as high as predicted [0], a lot more storage is required for the wind system so reducing its value.
[0] https://chrisbond.substack.com/p/desnz-to-include-some-reali...
What do you do when there is no wind and it is cloudy. Dont turn on your tea kettle?
Wind and solar are extremely unstable. Spain had a country-wide blackout earlier this year because of reactors being off. Days with peak solar and wind (heavily subsidized) made nuclear not viable. But you need a stable source to keep the grid from collapsing (and not fry appliances), like nuclear or hydro. It's like both a pace-maker and a goakeeper.
So you need a mix. Small reactors fix the problem of NIMBY caused by decades of fearmongering (now slowly reversing).
Depends on the load, but nuclear isn’t dependent upon batteries or the wind.
Depends on over provision then. If lowest demand in the grid is 20GW, average 30GW highest demand is 50GW then you need to be able to generate 50GW, despite nuclear costs only being specced assuming they can always find 20GW of customers.
It’s the same problem as wind has where demand and supply are variable.
Nuclear cant scale up in an affordable cost as the first GW is amortised over 8,760 hours a year, but the top 10GW is only needed 50 hours a year. If it’s £8760 to generate 10GW for a year, that means you have to spend £43,800 to be able to cope with a peak of 50GW, but the average demand of 30GW means the average cost is £14,600 - 65% more than the average “base load”
True, but for most places you'll now be dependent on some other country selling you uranium. Which is something many countries are now factoring in into these kind of decisions.
In the UK, probably nuclear.
Nuclear is surprisingly expensive and solar/wind/storage is surprisingly cheap. Even solar in the UK has better economics than nuclear, and it has no shortage of wind.
The outcome of Contracts for Difference (CfD) Allocation Round 6 suggests wind isn't cheap compared to wholesale electricity prices in the UK, which are already one of the highest in the world. The maths is quite simple.
And that doesn't include curtailment costs, which are not insignificant.
The average strike price for offshore wind in AR6 came in at £59.90/MWh. That's pretty cheap, and much cheaper than any new nuclear. Hinkley Point C's strike price is £92.50/MWh. (note: strike prices are always quoted based on 2012 currency, and get adjusted for inflation)
You can't really compare strike prices to spot prices on the wholesale market precisely because there's so much supply under CfD contracts, which distorts the wholesale market. When supply is abundant, the wholesale price plummets and even goes negative, yet suppliers still want to generate because they get the CfD price. When supply is constrained (eg: cold snaps in winter with little wind), the spot price can surge to £1000/MWh.
That £59.90 figure is 2012 prices.
In 2024 money offshore was £102 offshore, onshore £89. AR7 estimates are >10% higher. Those prices were not high enough for Hornsea 4, who cancelled the contract (with a big write down for the entire project) after being awarded it.
Hinkley C is, as everyone knows, a disaster.
Yes, like I said, UK CfD strike prices (both nuclear and wind) are always quoted in 2012 prices.
But even adjusting for inflation, offshore wind's £59.90 is a fraction of the retail price that UK consumers and most businesses pay for electricity. There's plenty of margin left for the middlemen (regulator, grid operator, distribution network operator, electricity retailer, etc).
... and Hinkley Point C's £92.50 is £133.79 today, and could be £160+ by the time it actually starts generating in (maybe?) 2031.
Yeah, the UK is probably one of the best places for offshore wind, and they're building gigantic fields.
And compared to what Hinkley Point C is gonna cost... solar and wind is basically for free
With the big * of solar being fairly predictable, and wind not. You can be bereft of wind for weeks.
Not when you take the circular economy into account. We’ve always been very good at making boilers. Less so semiconductors.
Truly great news. Less competition in the renewable energy sector for us.
Nuclear and security, that’s a good one especially nowadays when companies tend to connect everything to the internet and drone wars are a thing since the war in Ukraine.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/09/ukraine-war-br...
Didn’t here similar about wind and photovoltaics
Nuclear is an industry that strangled itself with red tape and harmful PR, making every project fiendishly expensive and take so many decades that cost-of-capital costs are insane.
I don't think it will ever again beat solar+wind+battery for grid scale carbon-free power pricing.
Even if it had never had those issues, nuclear power would still be the textbook example of a fragile system - capital-intensive, centralized projects that can be shut down by disruption to fuel shipments halfway round the world, droughts in the cooling system's water sources, or any of a dozen unions of specialized workers going on strike. Add to that iteration cycles measured in decades instead of years and it's hard to imagine how Nuclear could ever even close the gap, let alone pull ahead.
I have a theory that smart financiers avoid nuclear because getting a new version done on time and under budget is so damn hard, and smart physicists gravitate to nuclear for the same reason. I wish the nuclear-curious factions would pivot to a project Orion style endeavor instead of powering a UK hamlet sometime in the 2030s. Now there's something insanely difficult and likely to fail that I wouldn't mind my tax dollars being spent on.
But the wind &solar is highly dependant on rare earth minerals that China can limit at any time.
And their condition is for us to accept their highly subsidized products (cars, solar), which make our manufacturers go bankrupt.
It also makes us lose manufacturing capacity for dual use products like drones etc.
Not once it's installed! And no such conditionality exists.
Capitalism is extremely poor at "fragile systems", and for whatever reason (water under the bride now) the nuclear industry never made the move to smaller modular systems - even for large installations (think a reactor hall with 20 small cores rather than a single large core).
Even this project sounds like a custom on-site build, although at the moment it is still vapourware.
> I don't think it will ever again beat solar+wind+battery for grid scale carbon-free power pricing.
The problem the UK has is their climate: Northerly enough that solar makes 5x as much power in the summer as it does in the winter, and much more demand for heating in the winter than cooling in the summer.
Batteries are fine for storing solar in the day and using it at night - but much less good for summer-to-winter storage. And the UK isn't exactly eager to start flooding desolate valleys for pumped storage reservoirs either.
Oh, and they don't just need to decarbonise their existing electricity output - they also need to greatly increase their electricity output to hit their goals on EV and heat pump adoption; and they need to lower electricity prices too.
I can see why they'd hedge their bets.
The UK has massive wind resources up north. Absolutely no need for summer-to-winter storage, that would be madness!
This was my impression as well, both watching Smarter Every Day and visiting a nuclear power plant myself and taking the tour.
Yes, safety is important, but I think they're far into diminishing returns territory, and we have to take the penalty in both energy cost and security.
Wasn't all that bad PR mostly caused by the coal/oil industry, doing some serious astroturfing for a decade or so?
I think it was mostly caused by fear about nuclear Armageddon during the cold war - it's hard to feel like the world could end at any second due to nuclear bombs while also feeling grateful for nuclear electricity generation. Would be even if there was no overlap between military and civilian nuclear industries, which of course there is.
Well, at least for Germany it was the actual nuclear fallout over large areas of the country after Chernobyl. Which is btw still measurable today. [1] That's a pretty scary thing to happen to you and one just has to accept that these are the actual lived experiences of people that form their opinions.
[1] https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush...
Radiation detectors can detect very low levels of radiation (far below any measurable health effects, for instance), so claiming we can still detect fallout from Chernobyl doesn't really say anything.
To quote from the article I linked to:
> In the last years values of up to several thousand becquerel per kilogram were measured in wild game and certain edible mushrooms. In Germany it is not permitted to market food with more than 600 becquerel caesium-137 per kilogram.
If by "the coal industry" you mean people in charge of Chernobyl and Fukushima...
Oh, sorry! Shouldn't have said "all" there... :'D
And Windscale (now Sellafield) and Three Mile Island
See also: Gazprom, Gerhard Schröder (”Putin’s man in Germany” according to NYT) and the German nuclear power shutdown.
https://atomicinsights.com/gazprom-profiting-mightily-from-g...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/world/europe/schroder-ger...
Producing power by the mid 2030s? Isn't the entire point of SMRs that they are effectively a complete package and it takes very little effort to ship them out and getting them to produce power. Or is this just a pipe-dream we were sold?
Like, I imagined these things being compact enough to be shipped to the outskirts of towns and producing power. Afterall, they are from the same technology that was powering nuclear subs, right?
This Rolls Royce design isn't all that "small." A RR SMR design is a 470MWe PWR. About half the size of a typical PWR reactor. Fukushima Daiichi Unit 1 was 460MWe. Calling this an "SMR" is a stretch, likely for PR purposes.
It's a rather conventional design, low enriched fuel, no exotic coolants. There is a paper on it at NRC[1]. And they've never built one, so if they get it running by the 2030's they'll be doing pretty well for a Western company.
[1] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2521/ML25212A115.pdf
The reactor is still to be developed by Rolls Royce, which is hidden in mid article. The don't have plans, not even a working prototype yet, so expect delays to at least the mid 2040s.
The underpant gnome version of nuclear power?
Step 1: Find and reserve site of nuclear plant
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Power!
One has to expect any promise of future nuclear to have the optimism turned up to 11, right to the limit of plausibility. The reality will inevitably disappoint.
> Isn't the entire point of SMRs that they are effectively a complete package and it takes very little effort to ship them out and getting them to produce power.
That's the point if / when we have actually working SMRs, with production lines set up. But the limited development of small civilian reactors before the 80s and the 3 decades freeze on most things nuclear means SMRs are only just getting out of research status (e.g. in the US only NuScale's VOYGR are currently certified).
This has kind of been the problem with SMRs; they sound great, but as you develop them, they get less and less small and modular. These are 470MWe. Coincidentally, the (very old) 'normal' MAGNOX reactors which used to operate at this site were 490MWe; in their day they were considered quite large.
> Afterall, they are from the same technology that was powering nuclear subs, right?
Not usually, no; that wouldn't be cost-effective.
> Not usually, no; that wouldn't be cost-effective.
The reason being that the nuclear sub reactors run on very enriched uranium which is very expensive and not fun if some got away.
That was just for the news headlines, nuclear isn't and never has been, "practical". Look on the bright side, so much taxpayer money will go into this, it's probably going to make someone richer.
I doubt you could ship one. The cores need specialised port facilities to even get them into the subs.
> "The old nuclear power plant at Wylfa was switched off in 2015"
Tangentially—this is a brownfield site, where there once was an early generation of nuclear fission reactor, cooled by CO2 gas. Here's a brief description of what those machines looked like (not this exact one):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29890470 ("Nothing like this will be built again"—263 comments)
Wylfa was Magnavox, not AGR. AGR was the next generation that never went full commercial.
Had a tour of the place back in the day before 9/11 and all that made the world a lot less fun.
>estimated date of completion (2035)
Ignoring cost, I sometimes wonder why we cant build this in 1 - 2 year. And if the first one takes 5 years, why the second one isn't 5 times faster.
It frustrates me that nothing in UK is done with any urgency. And I bet that the Estimate date will be off as well.
I believe the more technologically advanced we live the more energy we will use. Travel requires energy, ai models require energy, healthy food requires energy
The cheaper and more abundant we can make electricity, the faster we can reap the benefits of new technology
imo nuclear is an important part to have abundant energy at all times
This is a rare moment of sanity in energy policy. It’s not about wind vs nuclear. We (the whole world) need everything we’ve got. SMRs have the potential to move nuclear out of its mainframe era.
Remember iPhones would cost ~$billions each too if you only made 12 of them.
That's not what we're seeing with nuclear power though. At least so far. Counterintuitively it seems to get more expensive the more you build of the same design: [1]
> Among the surprising findings in the study, which covered 50 years of U.S. nuclear power plant construction data, was that, contrary to expectations, building subsequent plants based on an existing design actually costs more, not less, than building the initial plant.
[1] https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118
Mass production has never been tried before for nuclear so those 50 years don’t tell us much about the possibilities for the next 50 years. They built multiple mainframes of the same design too, but the scale remained tiny and so the costs remained high.
So Rolls Royce makes cars, engines for planes, and nuclear reactors?
The car company is a different entity owned by BMW.
We desperately need regional pricing. If we had that, manufacturers and data centres would be able to move to places like this, or to scotland, and get almost free electricity.
And then electricity producers would have a huge incentive to build generation in places where electricity is actually used. And NIMBYs would be told to fuck off, because letting someone build an energy source would make your electricity cheap.
> If we had that, manufacturers and data centres would be able to move to places like this, or to scotland, and get almost free electricity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglesey_Aluminium used to be close to Wylfa.
This live dashboard puts this number in perspective - https://grid.iamkate.com/
Roughly: the demand is about 33-35GW. That’s projected to become 50GW by 2050 as transportation and home heating become electrified. So that’s the puck we’re skating towards.
Nuclear supplies a constant 10% of the demand today (more, if you count imports from France). The goal is to power 20% of the 50GW demand through nuclear. If it’s cheap, even more. Each of these Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) generates 470MW, so we’d need about 20 of them.
The plan is to set up a factory near Sheffield and produce the reactor parts like IKEA, so they can be assembled on site. The hope is that manufacturing and assembling the same product repeatedly makes people more efficient. That’s the main problem with nuclear - over budget and delays - that SMRs aim to fix.
I’m glad the UK is taking electrification seriously, and is investing in domestic industry that will hopefully export reactors if it’s successful. Some folks might look at the estimated date of completion (2035) and get discouraged, but I wouldn’t. The best time to plant this tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
“like IKEA” sounds misleading at best.
Misleading how? That’s precisely how SMRs differ from traditional plants - they’re manufactured in a factory instead of being constructed on-site. That’s exactly like the difference between IKEA and constructing furniture from scratch using blocks of wood.
> Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) generates 470MW, so we’d need about 20 of them
A more realistic target, one that would make this all more viable, would be 50MW and make 200 of them.
That was the SMR dream, but it largely hasn't worked out, for various reasons. Most 'SMR' designs have grown to suspiciously close to er, normal nuclear reactors.
Hopefully not another HS2
Anglesey is beautiful[0]. My ancestors came from there and I used to holiday there as a child. Today it is somewhat blighted by those ugly and noisy turbines[1]. I am in favor of this if it reduces the number of onshore turbines on the island.
0 https://www.celtictrailswalkingholidays.co.uk/wp-content/upl...
1 https://i2-prod.walesonline.co.uk/article21841043.ece/ALTERN...
Hopefully we can go back to just having the big beautiful high voltage power lines again.