Adapted from an original image by The Digital Artist https://pixabay.com/users/thedigitalartist-202249/

The deal done during President Trump’s state visit to the UK for a “golden age of nuclear” is a policy standing on ice as thin as that in the Arctic in mid-summer. It’s a sign of increasing desperation on the part of the US, on a par with their deal with the EU for the EU to buy $750 billion of US LNG, which there is neither the tankers to transport, nor the terminals to receive, nor the demand in EU countries, nor the capacity for the EU to force member states to buy.

The main driver of the planned increase is bringing UK regulation in line with the US, to shorten the period required to get planning permission, and to cooperate on the technology and “fast track safety checks”. As David Toke has argued, “small modular reactors will not produce cheaper outcomes…if we assume that small reactors have to deliver the same safety levels as big reactors.”  Cutting planning scrutiny and safety checks for nuclear reactors that will be put into prefabs, because the clock is ticking, is alarming. Perhaps they think that Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima were a while ago now, so perhaps it’s time to cut a few corners and hope for the best. What could possibly go wrong?

The function of the deal, according to US secretary of energy, Chris Wright, is to “unleash commercial access in both the US and UK” thereby “enhancing global energy security, strengthening US energy dominance (our emphasis) and securing nuclear supply chains across the Atlantic.” Reuters reports that, according to the director of the US Energy Dominance Council (and what a name for a body that is), the Trump administration is more willing to support loan guarantees and tax breaks for nuclear power than for wind and solar because it is “more American”. As American as radioactive apple pie.

There are, however, structural problems in turning this fantasy into any kind of reality, as the problems with the Small Modular Reactors that they have in mind are not to do with regulation, but with engineering and economics. 

Nuclear is rapidly being eclipsed by renewables, which are cheaper and faster to deploy. “In 2024, with just seven new reactors brought online and four shut down, while solar alone added hundreds of gigawatts of new capacity”…while energy storage “passed a trigger point,”and low-income countries are starting to leapfrog to renewables.” 

Nuclear is slow to build. More than one-third of the world’s 63 nuclear construction projects are behind schedule, 14 of them are reporting increased delays. 

Nuclear is relatively expensive. “Competition from cheaper non-hydro renewables and battery storage is expected to have a broad impact, as investment in renewables was 21 times that of nuclear last year, while added capacity was more than 100 times net nuclear additions,” according to Reuters. “Battery costs are also falling, down about 40% in 2024, while nuclear plant costs continue to rise.” An example is the Darlington SMR project in Ontario,which will cost up to 8 times more than power from onshore wind turbines, almost 6 times that of power from solar farms and be up to 2.7 times the cost of Great Lakes offshore wind. This is not an anomaly. 

Nuclear doesn’t fit the new system. “New energy technologies disrupt markets and systems..Photovoltaics directly produces electricity from solar radiation in harmless, nanometer-thin semiconductor junctions, allowing for ongoing steep cost reductions and performance increases. This is complemented by similar advances in power electronics and batteries. Together, these new technologies are evolving towards a highly flexible, fully electrified energy system with a decentralized control logic, outcompeting traditional centralized fossil and nuclear systems” so nuclear energy, “increasingly has difficulties to survive in this context.”

Any country investing in it as a provider of “baseline energy” will saddle their people with higher cost electricity. Because of the nature of nuclear power stations, they have to be run constantly to stop melt downs. They are therefore clumsy and inflexible, can’t be switched on and off as needed, and, to keep going will displace cheaper electricity from renewables.

“Small Modular Reactors” don’t exist” Not outside China anyway. China is responsible for 50% of new nuclear and they have two SMR designs, but neither are yet widely operational. Moreover, cooperating with China is hardly compatible with the “US energy dominance” that’s the point of building them; hence the very costly withdrawal of Chinese investment from Sizewell C. Western SMRs only exist as “power point reactors” and “nobody, not even industry, pretends they can produce anything before 2030. That’s the earliest,” so “it’s already very simple—it’s much too late, and we don’t know if it’ll work, or what it’ll cost.”

The idea in the UK/US deal that factories run by Centrica and X- Energy in Hartlepool can knock out 12 SMRs, which will then be assembled on site like a glow in the dark IKEA flatpack, runs into two fundamental problems. The reason that nuclear power stations got bigger in the first place was to reduce costs per Kilowatt hour and cover safety concerns. As David Toke notes “The nuclear industry gradually increased the size of reactors to reduce costs per MW through capturing economies of scale. Logic dictates that SMRs will be more, not less, costly than the conventional contemporary nuclear projects.” 

And the former Chair of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Alison Macfarlane, argues that nuclear waste problems from SMRs will be worse than with conventional reactors and that “many studies show that the economics of SMRs will be much costlier than that of large LWRs, thereby will not be competitive or profitable.” 

So a “small” reactor will be more expensive and less safe. Any volunteers to pay the bills? 

Or live next to one?

Or have a waste storage facility as a neighbour? 

The BBC reports that the UK’s Nuclear Industry Association has said that finding a functioning nuclear waste site is “key to the credibility and sustainability” of the UK’s nuclear programme. None has yet been found. In the last Parliament Conservative MPs very keen on nuclear power in principle were very jumpy about nuclear waste being stored anywhere near their constituency.

There’s not enough Uranium. It takes ten to twenty years to start digging uranium out after a new discovery. Existing mines are getting as exhausted as North Sea oil and gas, with output projected to halve between 2030 and 2040, while demand is expected to rise by a third; largely driven by China and India, irrespective of what happens elsewhere. This will make the costs even higher than they currently are. Paradoxically, US uranium is largely supplied by Russia. Something to bear in mind the next time Trump sounds off about Europe buying Russian gas. Their aim to get off this by 2028 also begs the question of where they are going to try to source an alternative supply, and how.

The two bottom lines here are

1. This new generation of nuclear power stations is unlikely to be profitable. Even the existing projects – like Sizewell C – have had to be underwritten by government to keep private investors on board.
2. There is a limit to the extent to which governments can keep these exponentially capital-hungry projects alive before the costs become too much of a burden to bear, and Atlas has to shrug.

Therefore, the promises of jobs that sweeten them are a will o’ the wisp – the phantom light that lures travellers to danger,

Watching Donald Trump’s bizarre ramblings at the UN, it’s evident that the US, in its imperial dotage, is increasingly basing its strategies on unhinged fantasies and wishful thinking. It is an indictment of the Right in the UK that they adopt this stuff off the peg, from the self-destructive xenophobia to the climate denial, along with the dark money donations that come with it, having outsourced their brains to the USA a long time ago. Our deeply “patriotic” Far Right, Reform and Conservative Parties are now agents of “Global US Energy Domination”. The current government, recognising that “drill baby drill” in the North Sea is futile in an almost exhausted field, and that fracking is geologically impossible in the UK, is nevertheless compromising with it – and throwing away investment into a fake solution that will take resources away from genuine solutions: upgrading the grid, ensuing solar and wind farms are built and connected, tidal power is properly researched, trialed and scaled up, homes are insulated.

The new nuclear golden age will not get very far, but the sooner it is stopped, the more we can limit the damage.

Paul Atkin