Vocal Voices

Rolls Royce have apparently been building these for some considerable time.

The British government has plans for small nuclear reactors to help meet our future energy needs.

So you would think getting these reactors built would be a no brainer.

But for months and months the government has been shuffling it's feet and saying nothing, and now we know why.

It's because Bill Gates, the UK policians favourite billionaire, is interested too.

His firm TerraPower is considering bidding for any new British reactors.

Oh dear! So what is Rishi going to do?*

Upset the British public, or upset Bill Gates?

* Odds on he will kick the can down the road until after the election and let Starmer make the call.

These types of reactor have been powering ships since the 1950s.

The UK should have been installing them for the last decade, maybe longer. One estimate from years ago said that we would need about 16 of them, most adjacent to big cities to reduce transmission problems - they would power the local grid.

Combined with very environmentally friendly small scale hydro we could do away with all the onshore windmills... and quite a few offshore ones. We would also not need all the solar farms using up valuable farmland, especially if we went for putting them on industrial unit rooves.

Unfortunately our non-technicallly minded and useless politicians have placed our futures in the large scale nuclear and the wind and solar baskets. Why?

I suspect that it is because they are big ticket items suitable for a photo shoot in a Hi-Viz jacket and a hard hat as the ribbon is cut.

Wikipedia has a good article on this.

As with everything there are pro's and con's.

The main pro is faster to deliver, cheaper to deliver, smaller footprint, ability to make it safer. Which means less government churn, less chance they will be cancelled and much shorter times before money starts coming back in. Which also means any company delivering them can, for instance, put 2/3 of them out there, get some money back and use that money to put another 2/3 out there.

The main con is that the electricity it produces would be much more expensive, at least initially, due to not getting the economy of scale of a large reactor. Before the last price rises due to the Ukraine war, this would have been a problem. Wholesale prices for electricity were £42 per mw/h, the strike price for Hinckley was considered excessive at £95 and customers were paying £165.

Now customers are paying £250 or more, £95 is not looking so excessive so a SMR with £100 or higher would not seem so bad.