What's taking Britain so long to build new nuclear power plants?
When Putin attacked Ukraine and sent global gas prices soaring, Boris Johnson set out a plan to make Britain energy secure. It included a target to quadruple the amount of power Britain gets from nuclear. Instead of one plant every decade (if you're lucky), Britain would start building a new plant every year just as we did in the 50s and 60s.
This plan relied not only on building 'giga-scale' plants like Hinkley Point C (at £42 billion now the most expensive plant in the history of the world), but also new small modular reactors (SMRs) built off-site in factories and deployed in fleets. This should, at least in theory, be something Britain excels at. Our fleet of nuclear submarines are propelled by small nuclear reactors built in the Midlands by Rolls-Royce. And Rolls-Royce also happened to have developed a small modular reactor design for civil use too.
What has traditionally put governments (and private utilities) off nuclear is the cost.
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