Damian Carrington blogs that industry is looking to the UK to develop factory-built reactors ready to provide affordable, low-carbon energy wherever it is needed, but issues around security and waste disposal remain, or so says Mr. Carrington.
Mini nuclear power plants could be trucked into a town near you to provide your hot water, or shipped to any country that wants to plug them into their electricity grid from the dock. That is the aim of those developing small modular reactors (SMRs) and, from the U.S. to China to Poland, they want the UK to be at the center of the nascent industry. The UK government says it is fully enthused about the technology.
With UN climate change summit in Paris imminent, the question of how to keep the lights on affordably, while cutting emissions, is pressing.
SMRs aim to capture the advantages of nuclear power, always-on, low-carbon energy, while avoiding the problems, principally the vast cost and time taken to build huge plants. Current plants, such as the planned French-Chinese Hinkley Point project in Somerset, have to be built on-site, a task likened to building a cathedral within a cathedral but that will operate 24/7 for 80 years, or more.
Instead, SMRs, would be turned out by the dozen in a factory, then transported to sites and plugged in, making them, in theory, cheaper. Companies around the world, including Russia, South Korea and Argentina, are now trying to turn that theory into practice and many are looking at the nuclear-friendly UK as the place to make it happen.
There is a lot of terrific things about the UK market that makes it the right place to deploy new nuclear technology, said Tom Mundy, head of program development at U.S. company NuScale, one of the frontrunners. It has a government committed to reducing carbon and seeing nuclear as one of the solutions, and it has a substantial and pre-eminent legacy of nuclear operations, a trained and capable workforce, and a nuclear supply chain.
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