Rolls-Royce gets £450m for small nuclear reactor project | energy industry

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Rolls-Royce will press ahead with a multi-billion pound plan to launch a new breed of small nuclear reactor after securing more than £450 million from government and investors.

The engineering firm will create a project focused on developing small-scale nuclear reactors, or SMRs, in partnership with investors BNF Resources and US generator Exelon Generation with a joint investment of £195 million to fund plans over the next three years.

The government will match the investment of the consortium, which is set to receive the second phase of a £50m increase from Rolls-Royce, with £210m to help roll out mini nuclear reactors as part of the government’s 10-point green plan to kickstart the green economy over the next decade.

Ministers hope the new generation of SMRs will be faster and cheaper to roll out than conventional large-scale nuclear reactors – such as the 3,200-megawatt Hinkley Point C project – which face enormous construction risks, and are subject to escalating costs and delays.

The Hinkley Point C reactor was initially expected to cost £18 billion, but the figure rose to around £23 billion at the Somerset site as EDF and ministers struggled to agree a new funding framework for a later project at Sizewell C in Suffolk.

Rolls-Royce has promised to “harness decades of British engineering, design and manufacturing expertise” to roll out its first small reactors based on similar technology used to propel nuclear submarines.

Each reactor initial run is expected to have a generating capacity of 470 megawatts, or enough to power the equivalent of 1.3 million homes in the UK, and cost around £2 billion on average, well below the price per megawatt that developers are seeking. Big projects. Nuclear reactors.

About a fifth of the UK’s electricity is generated by 13 nuclear reactors, but more than half of the country’s 7.8 gigawatts of nuclear capacity is set to be retired by 2025, leaving a looming gap in the electricity supply and the risk of a growing dependence on gas-powered plants.

Tom Samson, chief executive of Rolls-Royce SMR Consortium, said the project was set up to “deliver a low-cost, deployable, scalable and investable program of new nuclear power plants” to help the UK achieve its net-zero targets.

Samson added that this approach would rely on “predictable plant components” and proven technology to create an “investable” nuclear option.

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Ultimately, the consortium hopes to build on an initial set of five SMRs, the first of which could run by 2031, to create a multibillion-pound stable of 16 SMRs across the country.

Kwasi Quarting, Minister for Business, described the switch to SMRs as “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the UK to deploy more low-carbon energy than ever before and ensure greater energy independence”.

He added that the SMR program “will provide exciting opportunities to cut costs and build faster”, and will help reduce the UK’s dependence on fossil fuels while creating new jobs and local industry.

“We can not only maximize British content, create new intellectual property and revitalize supply chains, but also position our country as a world leader in innovative nuclear technologies that we can export elsewhere,” he said.

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