UK government sets out plans to distract from their looming, devastating election defeat later in the year.
None of their plans have any relevance given how much of it they can implement in the time left in office.
Well if it’s like HS2, then you can expect a single reactor for the price of a whole country’s worth…
Nuclear is overpriced anyway. This is nothing but a boondoggle to tie down the next Labour government.
No mention of Rolls Royce’s mini-reactors in there seems a bit suspect.
The energy secretary on Sky News just mentioned small modular reactors. That’s the same thing, right?
Their press release does talk about SMRs:
The Civil Nuclear Roadmap will give industry certainty of the future direction of the UK’s ambitious nuclear programme, on top of the government’s historic commitment to Sizewell C and world-leading competition to develop small modular reactor (SMR) technology.
[…]
Following its launch last year, Great British Nuclear (GBN) will drive the UK’s nuclear ambitions forward, including through the game-changing SMR competition which will soon invite short-listed companies to tender.
Unlike conventional nuclear reactors that are built on site, SMRs are smaller, can be made in factories, and could transform how power stations are built by making construction faster and less expensive. Alongside large gigawatt power stations, SMRs will play a key role in delivering on the expansion of UK nuclear capacity.
I misread the title as “biggest nuclear power explosion in 70 years” and thought they had a very dark sense of humour for a moment.
Does the Cornwall mine even has uranium left in it or do they have to buy all fuel from abroad (hopefully not russia)?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Ministers published a roadmap on Friday that recommits the government to building a fleet of nuclear reactors capable of producing 24GW by 2050 – enough to meet a quarter of the national electricity demand.
The roadmap echoes plans put forward by the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, in 2022 to “build a new [reactor] every year” to wean Britain off fossil fuel.
“The challenge is the industry has a record of running overbudget and behind schedule, so this does little to increase the UK’s energy security any time soon,” Ralston said.
Doug Parr, Greenpeace UK’s chief scientist, said: “Every few months the government makes a grandiose public announcement about future nuclear in the hope that a big investor will believe the hype and step up to fund this 20th-century technology, but it isn’t working.
“The energy industry knows that the economic case for slow, expensive nuclear just doesn’t add up, and the future is renewable,” Parr added.
“This vague, aspirational announcement with its unevidenced claims of cheap energy is unlikely to change their minds when there are real reactors overshooting their massive construction budgets and showing them the truth.”
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