🔒 SMRs could be the key to the UK's green energy future

Both UK political parties aim to decarbonize the electricity grid by 2030-2035, but achieving this is far from easy. The grid needs upgrades, renewable capacity must triple, and nuclear projects face delays. An alternative solution lies in Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), offering efficient, localized power. Promising advances in SMR technology suggest a potential path to a green, abundant energy future without extensive infrastructure costs and challenges.

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By Merryn Somerset Webb

Both big political parties in the UK intend to decarbonize the electricity grid. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___ The Tories say they will do it by 2035; Labour says it will by 2030. When they made these promises, it probably felt like it could be pretty easy. Bit of wind here, bit of solar there, chuck in some hydrogen, a few advances in battery storage, a new nuclear plant for a bit of back up — and, hello, carbon-free grid.

It turns out this isn’t remotely easy.

Building renewable capacity is tough: Analysis from the Institute for Public Policy out last week warned that the UK must triple the rate at which it’s building offshore wind to have a hope of meeting its target of 50 gigawatts of capacity by the end of the decade. Building storage isn’t easy either: In 2023, only 1% of the electricity we used had been stored. And building nuclear in the UK is almost absurdly hard: The Hinkley Point C reactor plant is now running a decade late and looks like it will end up costing no less than £34 billion ($43.4 billion), partly as a result of the 7,000 changes made to the design to fit UK regulations.

Then there’s the UK electricity grid itself. This was originally designed to take electricity from a small number of huge power stations located close to areas of dense populations to those nearby populations. Today, it needs to take energy from thousands of producers mostly located far away from those populations. It isn’t anywhere near up to that job: Waiting times for new renewable projects and developments are getting longer and longer. According to Deloitte, around 40% of renewables developments wait for a grid connection for over a year.

All this can be fixed — just not on the cheap and not in time. Modeling from Aurora Energy Research suggests that paying for the cables, transformers, substations and the like would come to around £116 billion over the next 11 years (but also be “likely impossible”). All this is made harder by the fact that electricity demand is not static (the National Grid expects it to double by 2050) and by the trouble of getting people to reduce their energy use.

One example: The UK has been making an effort to persuade the owners of older houses to retrofit them with insulation to reduce energy use. The result has been a rash of media stories about how the government prevents houses built to breathe from breathing — and leaves them full of back mould. Less energy use perhaps — but also lower living standards. The upshot is this: There is now almost no one who will, in private at least, tell you that the UK grid will be carbon-free by 2030 or 2035. Not with the current strategy.

But might there be another way? Are we missing a trick? Maybe.

In his book The Secret of Our Success, evolutionary biologist and Harvard University Professor Joseph Henrich discusses the brilliance of the networked brain. The more we network, the more intelligent we become as a population, building and building again on each other’s knowledge to create increasingly incredible things. But it’s also, he suspects, possible for us to become over-connected such that we disagree too little — and choose the wrong path. There are limits to interconnectivity, it seems. Look, he says, to AI. The first approach was to write code that was supposed to yield machines that were “hyperrational, logical and free of emotions.” That turned out to be the wrong approach — it was better to train machines by “simulating neural nets to predict actual human output.” We wasted several decades with the first approach, says Henrich.

Might we be doing something similar with energy policy? Perhaps we should obsess less about having an energy “mix” and look for a policy that is not dependent on creating intermittent sources of energy far away from population hubs, not dependent on spending vast amounts on transporting that energy (with the losses along the way), and does not involve having to beg or force populations to use less energy?

Enter nuclear. Not over-priced, always-late, over-regulated Hinkley Point nuclear, but small nuclear in the form of relatively inexpensive, factory-produced Small Modular Reactors (SMRs).

A recent article from Eann Patterson and Richard Taylor for the Royal Society of Open Science at Liverpool University makes the case. It is, they say, perfectly possible within the confines of exiting technology to build factories that produce “sealed micro power units within a digitally enabled holistic assurance framework.” What this means is, if you were so minded you could pop up a factory, commoditize the production of mini power stations in contained boxes, roll them off the line and take them directly to the outskirts of the cities that need them. They would be manufactured, operated, removed and recycled by the same supplier.

Just one factory would replace a third of current fossil fuel-based electricity generation over 15 years. And four? Well, the entire electricity system would be fossil-free within 12 years and at a relatively reasonable cost (a few hundred million pounds per station perhaps). The grid would have to be upgraded but not by anywhere near as much as currently envisaged. There would be no intermittency problem and no need for back-up power plants. There would also be a security positive — a grid that relies on far away infrastructure and long-distance transmission is much more vulnerable than one comprised of localized, isolated mini stations.

This might sound a little out there, but it really isn’t. The challenge, say Patterson and Taylor, is not in the “technical feasibility” of the whole thing. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries is already planning prototype tests. Westinghouse is designing their eVinci transportable, mobile micro-reactor. Construction giant Kier is working with two firms on proposals for SMRs in the UK. Last year, six firms (including Rolls Royce, which is working on a modular assembly factory) were shortlisted in the UK in a competition for provide SMR prototypes.

The challenge would be in the creativity (“designing for factory production”), in quality management that helps the state and the population trust in the safety of nuclear (far fewer deaths proportionally than any other form of generation), and in the introduction of pragmatic regulation that would allow standardization (there is no need for 7,000 changes for every station). Get that right and no “mix” is required. Just SMRs. The market thinks this will happen (Cameco, the energy-services company, is up over 400% in give years). Now it’s politicians who need to change their focus to make sure it does. There’s a hint some of them at least might be getting this: The Conservative manifesto, out yesterday, promised to “approve two new fleets of Small Modular Reactors to rapidly expand nuclear power.”

It’s not before time. UK politicians like to present cheap energy as being about household bills (£300 off! £700 off!). But that’s a minor part of the benefits. The truth, as the analysts at Gavekal Research always say, is that “the economy is simply energy transformed.” Bursts of economic growth come with periods of cheap energy and “all the major structural bear markets in US history” have taken place when energy has been “structurally expensive.”

All parties are promising economic growth as the pathway out of the UK’s many problems. They might want to think again about the price of energy, how it’s the fastest path to growth, and how nice it would be to promise not just cheap but green and abundant electricity to all by 2026. With no new pylons and no black mould required.

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