Ed Miliband is strangling Britain's nuclear power potential

Telegraph

02-06-2025

The world is returning to nuclear energy, and of course America has to be the first, the biggest and the best.
'Swift and decisive action is required to jump start America's nuclear energy industrial base,' President Trump wrote last week, to 'ensure our national and economic security'.
Trump is turbocharging what Biden tentatively began in his Advance Act by simplifying licencing and speeding up the building process for nuclear infrastructure. The mood shift is significant, because since the Nuclear Regulation Commission was created 50 years ago, it hasn't commissioned a single new plant.
Elsewhere, Europeans are also shaking off their long-standing hostility, which is not easy to do when a coalition government may require the support of the Greens.
Last month, Belgium reversed a 2003 law phasing out nuclear energy. And here? While the UK was the world's pioneer in civilian nuclear energy, with a working reactor bubbling away in Harwell in 1947, things are anything but 'swift and decisive'.
In 2022, as his final act, a demob-happy Boris Johnson announced a massive expansion of nuclear power by 2050. Just in time, you might think, considering a vast deficit in generation capacity loomed.
By 2030 we could have just three operational reactors left. A roadmap published in January 2024 committed the UK to building 24GW of new capacity by 2050, both large and small.
Great British Nuclear was created and a competition launched to encourage the building of small modular reactors (SMRs). The value of our spent nuclear fuel, an asset which can be usefully exploited in ways unimaginable in the 1950s, was also recognised.
Bidders were informed that the six chosen for the initial shortlist would be whittled down to two. One would be a 'spades in the ground' choice with safety and design approval suitable for rapid deployment, to plug the energy gap. The other was understood to be a native design with export potential, which is a way of saying 'Rolls-Royce' without using the words 'Rolls' or 'Royce'.
'We were told that we won't put all our eggs in one basket,' says one industry insider. 'Very few nations have chosen just one'.
Bureaucrats delayed the competition using the election as an excuse, and then once again. Astonishingly the only design capable of putting spades in the ground, NuScale, was rejected last year, as I reported at the time.
NuScale had been Rolls-Royce's original partner before they divorced, had a head start, and would not be asking the taxpayer for subsidies. But the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (Desnz) explained that it 'did not meet the criteria for the SMR competition, as it had already begun production and did not need support getting to market'.
The goalposts had shifted – and haven't stopped moving.
Now officials insist there was only ever going to be one SMR competition winner – an account disputed by competition entrants and former ministers.
'It's dishonest and simply not true,' says one bidder. 'There were six bids for four slots in the final round, with everyone assuming it would have to be Rolls-Royce plus one. That was made clear in the bid process. It was always six, to four, to two.'
'Ed [Miliband] needs to stop his fixation with renewables at the expense of all else, and elect SMR technologies for deployment in the UK,' says Andrew Bowie, the shadow energy minister.
A Desnz spokesman says: 'Great British Nuclear is driving forward its SMR competition and has received final bids, which it is evaluating ahead of final decisions being taken.' NuScale sources maintain it could have working reactors by 2030, now the earliest is 2035, and that looks optimistic.
SMRs were originally envisaged as powering industrial installations, but the hype made nuclear more palatable. The UK's focus on going small has neglected the advantages of going big, with proven designs.
'We absolutely need more large-scale nuclear because those reactors have the design maturity, construction experience, operational record and supply chain readiness to mitigate project risks,' explains Tom Greatrex, chief executive of the Nuclear Industry Association.
'Since we need so much more reliable, clean power, we have to build more of the big proven technologies.' More than 70 reactors are currently under construction, according to the World Nuclear Association, almost all are large, gigawatt-scale reactors, and many of those are in China.
Prolonging the SMR beauty pageant might be good for civil servants and consultants, but not for industry or consumers who face the prospect of blackouts.
As Kathryn Porter, an energy analyst at Watt Logic, explains, the Iberian blackout in April and our very near miss on Jan 8 remind us how costly a generation deficit can be.
'With much of the gas generation fleet expected to retire in the coming years there are real blackout risks towards the end of this decade and into the 2030s depending on the rate of these retirements,' she says.
'The Iberian blackout resulted in seven fatalities in very benign weather conditions – a winter blackout in the UK would be significantly more dangerous.'
Ed Miliband sees himself in a heroic role as the saviour of the climate, but he is also a temporary steward of a great nation's scientific and technical heritage – we have engineers and scientists who the world envies. He has a duty to keep this alive. And even more so, to keep our lights on.