Nuclear Spring?

This week promises to be quite interesting on the nukes front.  We are promised announcements (belated) on the government’s Small Modular Reactor programme, and things have been looking up a bit on the Big Nukes front, too. 

We’ve looked at SMRs before.  The potential is certainly there, on paper – before the prospect is dashed by the NIMBY reaction, city by city, where they need to be installed in order to secure one of the primary benefits (= highly efficient district heating).  Still, Blair thought the British Public wouldn’t stand for any type of nuclear revival back in 2005, and forbad any mention of it before the GE of that year.  Plenty of people, including hereabouts, bitterly resent the Hinkley deal – but mostly on economic grounds (and warm traditional feelings towards the French, of course).  It doesn’t seem to be a vote-loser, though.  But that maybe because it is on a brownfield site in a remote Somerset field …

Needless to say, the would-be developers just want public money to get started.  They’ll probably get a bit, actually.

On that large-nuke front, the players who were making UK waves five years ago have more or less melted into the background (excepting EDF, of course) and, unsurprisingly, Centrica would like to be out altogether.  But the government seems to have found replacements for them – Chinese and Koreans – with revived interest in the Horizon and NuGen projects.  On paper (again) you could argue there is still 18 GW of capacity under consideration – that figure includes Hinkley, which is not actually being built yet, they are simply being rather flamboyant in their preliminary civil engineering (the photo they always show is just the concrete-mixing plant).

A week from now we may have a clearer picture.

ND