Starmer's nuclear reactors won't be small, cheap or popular
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Meanwhile, France and India are both doubling down on Modular Reactors [0], and can undercut Rolls Royce.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/india-france-sign-de...
https://www.lepoint.fr/economie/exclusif-l-audit-secret-qui-...
In fact France did spend money on a dozen projects. Real money. But then the projects were audited, ten of them were considered hopeless or even ridiculous, and the and the last two don't plan to produce electric power at all (they're basically nuclear-powered district heating). AFAICT noone really wants to double down on loss-making projects. I haven't heard about any new ideas after that in France.
France is trying to restart it's small modular reactor program by leveraging India's new RFP.
It's $60B allocated for small modular nuclear reactor development, and they've already gotten Russian (Rosatom) and American (Holtec and GE) players. France's EDF is joining in now as well.
India is the only large state other than China with active tenders for greenfield SMRs, and unlike China, India's RFP is now open to foreign companies due to recent amendments.
The British SMR project mentioned in the Guardian article itself includes an US-India joint venture between GE and the Madhvani family along with Rolls Royce [0]
[0] - https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/indian-family-busine...
I am not the person who wrote that France was doubling down.
It isn't. The money spent on startups was really lip-service in the context of the French nuclear sector. The article you linked to also uses the French word "enfumage", i.e. a smokescreen, which is indeed probably what most of those startups are doing.
> The reality is that they would not be small – for example, the system being developed by Rolls-Royce is 470 megawatts, larger than most of the old, now closed, magnox reactors that were built in the UK in the 1960s.
Small comes from the model definition (the S on SMR), it's fair to think that even a small model with modern technologies could deliver more energy than a gas cooled reactor built in the 1960s.
> And they will not be cheap – even backers, like the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, have admitted that they “could have higher costs per MW compared to gigawatt-scale reactors”.
Author now complain about higher costs because the reactor is "too small" but fall short to say that the higher costs are still at least the same level as solar and wind but much stronger availability, which is specially useful to deal with the "still dark weeks" that is the biggest problem in the UK's grid right now due to the dependency on gas to cover for baseload and all the contracts for difference affected by it.
Unless we're forecasting a revolution in offshore long transmission and battery in the next couple of years I don't know how you can think about reducing the cost per unit in the UK without nuclear.