The whole of Europe needs to get on with energy security and Britain can and should be a leader here, next to Netherlands, Sweden and France.
Doggerland. I've always found its geography and the idea that people lived there fascinating.
So nuclear reactors can be built to supply the energy and power as the offshore wind farms get decommissioned. The rise and fall.
> Another is the vast cost of nuclear compared to wind.
What do you mean by cost? Capital expenditure per kW of nominal capacity, or by total energy generated? Plus should we consider other costs (backup, transmission, curtailment)?
If that’s too expensive why not just build enough nuclear to cover it all.
Suppose you need 10GW of power for an absolute baseline. Enough to heat homes to a temperature that people don't freeze to death on a cold day, to keep power to hospitals and other critical services, etc. Then you need another 10GW on top of that to run aluminum smelters and heat homes to 80°F instead of 60°F and things like that.
If you have 20GW (average) of wind but you get an extended period of low generation and the batteries run down, people die. If you have 10GW (average) of wind and 10GW of nuclear and you get an extended period of low wind generation, the price of electricity goes up that week and people turn off their aluminum smelters and things but nobody dies. If you have 20GW of nuclear you can run the aluminum smelter 52 weeks a year instead of 51 but then people are paying more for electricity than they would with renewables in the mix, which isn't worth it.
So which one should we do?
What you’re saying is they they should use extremely expensive nuclear power to cover the easy portion and then have renewables when they are the most strained supply 37 GW.
Why not just cheap renewables for everything?
New built power literally does not make sense when real constraints are added.
The plans just to build a tunnel under the Thames in the UK in 2025 is over 2 million pages at the moment, imagine what it is for the Sizewell C reactor - the environmental assessment on its own was 44,000 pages.
SMRs are a good middle ground because they can be commercialized and cost can be driven down once the government gets out of the way.
The misinformation hasn’t occurred in a vacuum. The nuclear industry has been far from transparent in how it operates.
So you’re saying that we should turn off the nuclear plant?
What do we calculate? A generous 50% capacity factor?
The new built nuclear power now costs ~40 cents/kWh.
It just becomes ridiculously expensive when real world constraints are added.
The UK has adequate salt formations for large scale storage of hydrogen.
Good if they can get it to work; there's also a hydrogen/ammonia storage scheme being planned; https://www.statkraft.co.uk/newsroom/2025/statkraft-shares-p...
I think it's going to take a while, but certainly worth trying.
Nuclear is endless clean energy. Why do people like you keep ruining everything? If it wasn't for you, we'd have had full nuclear by 1980. No oil problems, no terrorist states, no dubai.
The UK hasn’t had any nuclear waste problems?
It might be the solution but pretending it’s perfect is how we got here.
The huge advantage of hydrogen here is that a gas turbine power plant might cost $600/kW, a tiny fraction of the cost of a nuclear power plant. So if you have a need for a backup plant whose cost will be dominated by amortization of its fixed cost, hydrogen beats nuclear.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cev03wer0p2o
And the subsidies needed to keep the price "low".
That’s why France had to raise the price because even with subsidies they couldn’t cover the costs
> That’s why France had to raise the price because even with subsidies they couldn’t cover the costs
I'm not quite sure what you meant by this. By France did you mean EDF? And which power station are you referring to?
[0] https://stopsizewellc.org/core/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/TE... page 5
[1] https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/o...
[2] https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/o...
I am not sure either. But they keep increasing the proposed subsidies for the EPR2 program, and they still haven't been able to pass them.
The French government just fell due to being underwater while being completely unable to handle it. A massive handout of tax money to the nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!
Yeah, nuclear is better than that.
You also do know that we despite 19 sanctions packages still haven’t been able to sanction the Russian nuclear industry? We’re just too dependent on it.
[1]: https://www.highnorthnews.com/en/eu-talks-tough-russian-lng-...
There's no sanctions on the Russian nuclear industry because it's a rounding error financially compared to gas or petrol.
The service that the money is paying for is to have a grid that is always producing enough energy for any demand at any given time. Having 10gw/h today but 0 tomorrow is worth close to zero. If people are asked how much they are willing to pay in order to not get disconnected, the current record in spot price are 580.55 per MWh (that is market price before taxes, connection fees, and so on). How long voters would accept a elevated price is a question that many countries in EU saw answered following the energy crisis.
So the best value for the money is the cheapest one that provide the service that people demand when all the costs are accounted for, and that does not cause voters to elect a new governments in order to have it solved.
How would you add an extremely expensive new built nuclear plant to this grid? Would you shut it down for days on end or try to run it as a peaker?
https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&...
Think 'agile', not 'waterfall'.
That doesn't follow necessarily. Wind & solar being the most cost effective doesn't mean you remove all backups just because they aren't as cost effective.
My point still stands though given that I specifically did not exclude any scenario. It makes more sense to optimize when you include all energy sources. It's still possible some sources won't end up in the final solution and that's fine.
It is done when moving electricity around when the grid is strained. Buy expensive electricity and sell it at even higher prices. But that is a vanishly tiny portion of the demand.
I'll point to Standard Thermal again here.
Diversity in renewable energy sources is important for grid resilience. Some areas are gonna be terrible for solar and good for wind. Some areas might not have proper water access for nuclear.
Another potential advantage is building energy generation closer to where it is needed as Britain is unable to build good interconnection infrastructure. I think this doesn’t actually happen so much – the main places you need power are where there are people, which is bad in the ‘people _really_ hate nuclear’ front, and regulators are very conservative and more wary the more people live nearby.
Wind+batteries is a bit viable (and helps with interconnect too in that if you can max out interconnect utilization by transferring energy from generation to storage near usage even when there is no immediate demand, you can move more energy with a given interconnect per day than if you only used it to directly move energy from generators to users) but estimates of battery storage required still seem potentially prohibitively high.
The general public don't understand nuclear. And we can thank CND, Greenpeace, and the mainstream press of the 60s onwards for regurgitating their misinformation and poor science as fact.
Modern designs are effectively melt-down proof. Nuclear waste storage is also hilariously funny. People understand not to tread on a railway line or get electrocuted and die, but somehow have a problem with burying waste at the bottom of a sealed mine in a geologically safe area many miles from the nearest village or town (never a city) in containers that have been tested to literal destruction is somehow a problem.
The sad irony is these eco-people's opposition to nuclear for decades has resulted in gigatons of CO2 from coal/oil/gas power stations.
"Originally constructed in the 1940s, 50s and 60s these facilities - two ponds and two concrete silos - no longer meet the safety requirements that are required today and present some of the most difficult decommissioning challenges - not just in the UK - but in the world."
The industry does not have a good reputation, and it only has itself to blame for that.
https://www.onr.org.uk/our-work/what-we-regulate/sellafield-...
[0] https://chrisbond.substack.com/p/desnz-to-include-some-reali...
So you need a mix. Small reactors fix the problem of NIMBY caused by decades of fearmongering (now slowly reversing).
It’s the same problem as wind has where demand and supply are variable.
Nuclear cant scale up in an affordable cost as the first GW is amortised over 8,760 hours a year, but the top 10GW is only needed 50 hours a year. If it’s £8760 to generate 10GW for a year, that means you have to spend £43,800 to be able to cope with a peak of 50GW, but the average demand of 30GW means the average cost is £14,600 - 65% more than the average “base load”
And that doesn't include curtailment costs, which are not insignificant.
You can't really compare strike prices to spot prices on the wholesale market precisely because there's so much supply under CfD contracts, which distorts the wholesale market. When supply is abundant, the wholesale price plummets and even goes negative, yet suppliers still want to generate because they get the CfD price. When supply is constrained (eg: cold snaps in winter with little wind), the spot price can surge to £1000/MWh.
In 2024 money offshore was £102 offshore, onshore £89. AR7 estimates are >10% higher. Those prices were not high enough for Hornsea 4, who cancelled the contract (with a big write down for the entire project) after being awarded it.
Hinkley C is, as everyone knows, a disaster.
But even adjusting for inflation, offshore wind's £59.90 is a fraction of the retail price that UK consumers and most businesses pay for electricity. There's plenty of margin left for the middlemen (regulator, grid operator, distribution network operator, electricity retailer, etc).
... and Hinkley Point C's £92.50 is £133.79 today, and could be £160+ by the time it actually starts generating in (maybe?) 2031.
And compared to what Hinkley Point C is gonna cost... solar and wind is basically for free
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/09/ukraine-war-br...
Didn’t here similar about wind and photovoltaics
We still need to decarbonize tons of other industries so why waste money on the one we have solved?
Good enough beats imaginary engineer perfect solutions.
So, the solar/wind waste bugbear is a red herring, since dealing with it involves solving a problem that would have to be solved in a nuclear-powered economy also.
The opposite is not true of nuclear waste: there is no high activity radioactive waste stream in a non-nuclear economy.
Careful, your mask is slipping.
It is Ukraine, not The Ukraine. It is a country, not an area.
Ukraine's success against Russia's Black Sea fleet proves this for surface vessels. Similarly, it is easy to imagine a swarm of small underwater drones detecting, tracking and trailing nuclear submarines.
The UK government's is more focussed on providing juicy contracts to large corporations than realistic preparations for the future.
This is an oversimplification - Renewables are cheaper than nuclear, but they are also less reliable than nuclear in the sense that when the wind stops blowing, power stops being generated. Also if you include the cost of energy storage to survive a week or two without substantial wind, suddenly it's not the cheaper anymore.
A mixed nuclear + renewables grid would reduce the total cost because nuclear can provide a stable base load which isn't affected by seasonality. Modern plants can also ramp up/down to some extent to balance the overall system.
That's why you need an energy mix rather than just putting all your eggs in a single source.
I suspect you need far ledd in peaker capacity - both GW and GWh - with a 100% wind than 100% nuclear if you spend the same amount on wind and nuclear.
Still seems like a worthwhile pursuit though
other forms of renewables could generate electricity while cooling the planet.
a super chimney (perhaps suspended with balloons) piercing the tropopause and carrying either air in open or closed loop fashion, or a "refrigerant" (not necessarily a harmful one, could just be moist air, or any other medium of thermal exchange, like a gravity assisted heat siphon) in a closed loop could generate power while cooling the planet, it would also be base load given the large temperature difference between surface level and tropopause (which persists day and night, summer and winter). Obviously this can also be used to desalinate sea water by freeze desalination.
as soon as such technology takes off and multiple blocs make use of such technology, they will probably even get into arguments about how long or what fraction of the time each nation state is allowed to generate power this way (arguing it was our Western excessive CO2 consumption to which we have to thank this excess heat availability, and India countering that we should take into account their proper share of excess CO2 due to the underground coal mines that have been burning uncontrollably for decades on end, etc...) to the point of nation states attacking each others superchimneys.
Storage tech has been criminally underfunded and under-researched. There are many, many options. But because of poor investment decisions and lobbying from the usual suspects the tech is around twenty years behind where it could be.
First of, the UK are investing in battery storage, there’s already a rollout of grid-level battery systems across the country*.
None of them hold capacity for longer than 2 hours before they need to start discharging. In fact, the record breaking duration is 6 hours. This is great as a short buffer, but it’s not “storage”.
To put this in perspective, last year the UK went 2 weeks without any significant wind, so a 2 hour buffer is nothing. This is why Hydrogen is still being kept as an option for long term storage.
https://stateraenergy.co.uk/projects/thurrock-storage
https://rhomotion.com/news/longest-duration-battery-energy-s...
A 4 hour battery can run at 50% for 8 hours or 25% for 16 hours.
The determining factor is what the market needs.
It absolutely isn’t. There is very little crossover between the RR SMR (which is 470 MWe, not really an ‘SMR’ by IAEA definition) and a submarine reactor core. Sub cores are smaller and optimised for different conditions. They’re vastly different tech. The teams at RR working on these are totally distinct with no crossover.
RR just got £9B for sub NSSS work. They don’t need a back door subsidy when they have a big cheque coming right through the front door!
If anything, UK govt is prioritising domestic technology, whether or not that’s the best from a purely economic point of view.
This has been well known for a while, and western governments have started to say the quiet part out loud to justify the insanely large handouts required to build civillian nucleaar power.
https://theconversation.com/military-interests-are-pushing-n...
Ontario, Canada is building a bunch of BWRX-300 SMRs and don't really have a desire for a naval reactor programme:
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/carney-ford-announce-...
* https://www.opg.com/projects-services/projects/nuclear/smr/d...
* https://www.gevernova.com/news/press-releases/ge-vernova-hit...
Canada is currently looking at new submarines, and the final two candidates are both SSKs (and not nuclear SSNs):
* https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2025/08/28/canada-shortlis...
* https://www.canada.ca/en/public-services-procurement/news/20...
As an Ontario resident I wish they chose to build more CANDUs (which, AIUI, they are planning to do as well) rather than SMRs: our grid is in more need of 'bulk power', and SMRs are better suited to small grids (like the Canadian Maritimes) or small sites (like in Poland: replacing previous smaller scale coal plants).
I recommend everyone who is using the cost argument to actually do the math on this first. It might be an eye opening experience. It certainly was for me.
Those are called torpedoes.
America uses surface buoy’s to similar effect, going underwater would allow drones to be harder to detect. https://idstch.com/military/navy/navy-researching-new-buoy-t...
Of note you don’t necessarily need to be able to track a sub everywhere, an invisible underwater “fence” may be good enough.
Surface drones work well when air cover is limited/restricted. Tracking them via radar is difficult due to surface noise, but it can be done. Countering them isn't an impossible task either, it, like other threats are handled systematically. The Russians have a relatively slow OODA loop, and Ukraine has been very successful in leveraging their superiority.
Is the threat a universal one or limited to the UKR/Russian conflict? A little of both. We've seen where an unprepared ship can be easily damaged by a small boat laden with explosives (USS Cole). We've seen the Ukrainians shut down Russian activity in the Black Sea, even going so far as to down unwitting aircraft that didn't respect the threat. But militaries adapt, especially to proven threats. Witness how the West responded to the sinking of the Eilat in 1973. It developed countermeasures and weapon systems for the threat of cruise missiles, while simultaneously developing their own cruise missiles (Harpoon/Exocet/Otomat/Penguin).
Will undersea drones prove as concerning? I doubt small swarms of UUVs will proliferate like we've seen with FPV drones. Flying through the air is much much easier than operating in water. Propulsion, C2, and targeting is quite difficult underwater compared to UAVs. Both range and payload are a challenge, so I don't believe that a swarm of "small underwater drones" will be able to detect the quietest ships in the ocean any time soon, much less track and trail something that can travel at speeds above 40kts with ease.
Now will large UUVs have a role in future naval combat? Undoubtedly.
Are they still if you include storage, vs. nuclear's continuous generation?
The UK certainly does have continuous demand, our overall energy demand has rarely fallen below 25GW in the past couple of years. Right now gas makes up for much of that, the goal here is to replace gas with nuclear, using gas as baseload generation isn’t wise long term.
Source: https://grid.iamkate.com/
Saying “nuclear can handle the easy part” doesn’t help. You still need 20GW of extra capacity to cope.
It’s like saying “wind can handle the bulk of the capacity you just need to top up the rest”.
> Saying “nuclear can handle the easy part” doesn’t help.
That’s literally how baseload works, look at France’s energy mix for an example, they have nuclear handle the bulk of their demand (at least the very minimum it will ever be) and renewables + transfers handle the rest, if renewables goes up they export it or lower their nuclear output (yes, their nuclear output can be modulated).
> You still need 20GW of extra capacity to cope
The goal isn’t to replace the entire energy mix with Nuclear, the goal is to add enough nuclear in the mix so that we don’t need gas being generating all year round (gas sets the price in the merit order so we don’t want it on 24/7). If you added just 6GW of nuclear you’d be achieving that on some days.
I never quite understood the logic for this. Sure, if you overlay a simple upward sloping cost curve on a downward sloping demand-price curve, the market-clearing price is where they intersect, and that in practice much of the time is a gas generator.
But there must be a million other aspects that can affect what price needs to be paid to secure the capacity below that point. Surely only part of the total area under that market-clearing price needs to accrue to the generators?
And if generators are getting windfall profits, can't the market rules be adjusted so more of it can given to the consumers in the form of lower energy prices?
Can someone explain this? Maybe that is what actually happens, just it is too complex for the mass media.
What about when nuclear produces 20GW and wind 5 and demand is 35gw
Of nuclear costs the same as wind then why not have nuclear produce the full demand?
Net result renewables currently save you money until ~80% annual electricity supply. At which point adding more batteries and generation to cover overnight demand is cheaper than adding nuclear to the mix. In such a mix, Nuclear saves a little per kWh overnight and cost way more per kWh during the day, net result it’s more expensive as baseload. But, operating nuclear only at night drives up per kWh costs above storage.
Due to plant lifespans, new nuclear is already a poor investment which is why it’s rare, which then drives up construction costs. It’s a viscus cycle which ultimately dooms nuclear without massive subsidies which become hard to justify.
Assume you mean more expensive than nuclear in the second point?
Agree with your point although it's about wind in the uk rather than solar, and about being able to last a few weeks if there is calm weather rather than a day without sun, which is when having a nuclear baseload makes sense.
No, but I clarified the comment. My point is when taken in isolation nighttime nuclear costs less than nighttime batteries on a near zero carbon grid, however the economics operate 24/7/365. Nuclear heavily favors 24/7 operations so gaining 3c/kWh at night while losing 6c/kWh during the day is a net loss. Operating only at night almost doubles nuclear’s cost per kWh so you’d lose money anyway.
> weeks if there is calm weather rather than a day without sun, which is when having a nuclear baseload makes sense.
If you don’t have enough energy for a few days randomly you need peaking power generation not baseload. Nuclear is really bad at ramping up to meet sudden shortfalls.
The scenario you described is one of the very few cases where hydrogen might make sense assuming all fossil fuel use is banned. Without that natural gas is going to win to prevent random outages every few decades.
2025 is the year that storage is really being deployed in a serious manner in the US, more than 18GW most likely:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65964
You can see on the map at the bottom of this page that almost all the batteries are in areas that already have high amounts of renewables:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586
And the prevalence of batteries in Texas means that they must be cost effective, because all grid assets in Texas are from private investors risking their own capital, and there is zero incentive for batteries except for their profit generative capacity.
It could be - but the battery investments map also align with the map below which shows that these states (Texas & California) are also states suffering from blackouts.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/power-outag...
So while this could mean that storage is cheap, it could also mean 'Texas's mix and grid is unstable, particularly as it's not connected to the national grid, and this has opened the opportunity to profit from higher levels battery arbitrage that doesn't exist in a better balanced grid'
See https://www.ercot.com/mktinfo/prices and https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards and https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/energystoragere... for example.
Which is what you would expect of a stat of "number of outages per state". If it's not normalized for land area, population, and all the other primary contributors to the total number of outages it's a useless stat. San Francisco has more people in it that the entire state of Wyoming.
Texas' power is also cheap, so to justify batteries they would have to not raise the cost of electricity that much.
The current cost of grid batteries is hidden, but it's not too hard to find out, and it is indeed quite cheap. But if there's no mechanism to get paid, ie ability to do time arbitrage in the energy market, then they do not get deployed.
Electricity market design and the ability of ISOs/PUCs/utilities to adapt to changing technology are bigger barriers to batteries than their price.
Either way you are giving way to much credit to the power of the UK military industrial complex.
https://www.statista.com/chart/35117/levelized-cost-of-energ...
Taking the limit of free solar power, what would the storage requirements look like for the UK?
But it's not a simple picture. The grid needs to be expanded to distribute power from renewables more efficiently, batteries aren't the only storage option, and the concept is still too centralised.
A combination of distributed rooftop solar with domestic batteries, maybe local storage in substations, strategic national storage, and a mix of sources would be a more effective strategy than trying to park huge batteries around the country in the hope they'll be big enough.
The UK still has a post-war mindset around energy which doesn't make sense in the 21st century.
How many GWh? Citation please.
It’s either 27 or 27GW they are installing sorry.
There’s a massive difference.
I don't think it will ever again beat solar+wind+battery for grid scale carbon-free power pricing.
I have a theory that smart financiers avoid nuclear because getting a new version done on time and under budget is so damn hard, and smart physicists gravitate to nuclear for the same reason. I wish the nuclear-curious factions would pivot to a project Orion style endeavor instead of powering a UK hamlet sometime in the 2030s. Now there's something insanely difficult and likely to fail that I wouldn't mind my tax dollars being spent on.
And their condition is for us to accept their highly subsidized products (cars, solar), which make our manufacturers go bankrupt.
It also makes us lose manufacturing capacity for dual use products like drones etc.
Even this project sounds like a custom on-site build, although at the moment it is still vapourware.
The problem the UK has is their climate: Northerly enough that solar makes 5x as much power in the summer as it does in the winter, and much more demand for heating in the winter than cooling in the summer.
Batteries are fine for storing solar in the day and using it at night - but much less good for summer-to-winter storage. And the UK isn't exactly eager to start flooding desolate valleys for pumped storage reservoirs either.
Oh, and they don't just need to decarbonise their existing electricity output - they also need to greatly increase their electricity output to hit their goals on EV and heat pump adoption; and they need to lower electricity prices too.
I can see why they'd hedge their bets.
Yes, safety is important, but I think they're far into diminishing returns territory, and we have to take the penalty in both energy cost and security.
[1] https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush...
> In the last years values of up to several thousand becquerel per kilogram were measured in wild game and certain edible mushrooms. In Germany it is not permitted to market food with more than 600 becquerel caesium-137 per kilogram.
https://atomicinsights.com/gazprom-profiting-mightily-from-g...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/world/europe/schroder-ger...
Like, I imagined these things being compact enough to be shipped to the outskirts of towns and producing power. Afterall, they are from the same technology that was powering nuclear subs, right?
It's a rather conventional design, low enriched fuel, no exotic coolants. There is a paper on it at NRC[1]. And they've never built one, so if they get it running by the 2030's they'll be doing pretty well for a Western company.
Step 1: Find and reserve site of nuclear plant
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Power!
That's the point if / when we have actually working SMRs, with production lines set up. But the limited development of small civilian reactors before the 80s and the 3 decades freeze on most things nuclear means SMRs are only just getting out of research status (e.g. in the US only NuScale's VOYGR are currently certified).
> Afterall, they are from the same technology that was powering nuclear subs, right?
Not usually, no; that wouldn't be cost-effective.
The reason being that the nuclear sub reactors run on very enriched uranium which is very expensive and not fun if some got away.
Tangentially—this is a brownfield site, where there once was an early generation of nuclear fission reactor, cooled by CO2 gas. Here's a brief description of what those machines looked like (not this exact one):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29890470 ("Nothing like this will be built again"—263 comments)
Had a tour of the place back in the day before 9/11 and all that made the world a lot less fun.
The cheaper and more abundant we can make electricity, the faster we can reap the benefits of new technology
imo nuclear is an important part to have abundant energy at all times
Ignoring cost, I sometimes wonder why we cant build this in 1 - 2 year. And if the first one takes 5 years, why the second one isn't 5 times faster.
It frustrates me that nothing in UK is done with any urgency. And I bet that the Estimate date will be off as well.
Remember iPhones would cost ~$billions each too if you only made 12 of them.
> Among the surprising findings in the study, which covered 50 years of U.S. nuclear power plant construction data, was that, contrary to expectations, building subsequent plants based on an existing design actually costs more, not less, than building the initial plant.
And then electricity producers would have a huge incentive to build generation in places where electricity is actually used. And NIMBYs would be told to fuck off, because letting someone build an energy source would make your electricity cheap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglesey_Aluminium used to be close to Wylfa.
Roughly: the demand is about 33-35GW. That’s projected to become 50GW by 2050 as transportation and home heating become electrified. So that’s the puck we’re skating towards.
Nuclear supplies a constant 10% of the demand today (more, if you count imports from France). The goal is to power 20% of the 50GW demand through nuclear. If it’s cheap, even more. Each of these Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) generates 470MW, so we’d need about 20 of them.
The plan is to set up a factory near Sheffield and produce the reactor parts like IKEA, so they can be assembled on site. The hope is that manufacturing and assembling the same product repeatedly makes people more efficient. That’s the main problem with nuclear - over budget and delays - that SMRs aim to fix.
I’m glad the UK is taking electrification seriously, and is investing in domestic industry that will hopefully export reactors if it’s successful. Some folks might look at the estimated date of completion (2035) and get discouraged, but I wouldn’t. The best time to plant this tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
A more realistic target, one that would make this all more viable, would be 50MW and make 200 of them.
In short, I think you are exaggerating the downsides of maybe a potential 10x cost blowout on the budget of a government project and a trivial amount of waste disposal.
0 https://www.celtictrailswalkingholidays.co.uk/wp-content/upl...
1 https://i2-prod.walesonline.co.uk/article21841043.ece/ALTERN...
