Wind & nuclear together. Britain already has large wind installations, since the sea to the east is quite shallow (it used to be a land bridge to Europe only 7,000-10,000 years ago). Back that up with nuclear providing the base load and you have reasonable energy security.
As usual the answer is likely to be a combination of energy sources. It's not wind and solar (+storage) OR nuclear, it's wind and solar (+storage) AND nuclear (and of course other energy sources when appropriate).
One advantage nuclear may have in the UK is in the per-Megawatt planning applications required, purely by the energy generation being more concentrated. Of course, while people hate wind turbines and solar panels, they _really_ hate nuclear, but this can mean nuclear has some chance of getting special permits from central government.
Another potential advantage is building energy generation closer to where it is needed as Britain is unable to build good interconnection infrastructure. I think this doesn’t actually happen so much – the main places you need power are where there are people, which is bad in the ‘people _really_ hate nuclear’ front, and regulators are very conservative and more wary the more people live nearby.
Wind+batteries is a bit viable (and helps with interconnect too in that if you can max out interconnect utilization by transferring energy from generation to storage near usage even when there is no immediate demand, you can move more energy with a given interconnect per day than if you only used it to directly move energy from generators to users) but estimates of battery storage required still seem potentially prohibitively high.
How much fossil fuel are acceptable to burn, should subsidizes count to the total cost, should grid connections and transport count to the total cost, and what is the time frame? Is the market allowed to freely spike based on supply and demand with no price roof?
The service that the money is paying for is to have a grid that is always producing enough energy for any demand at any given time. Having 10gw/h today but 0 tomorrow is worth close to zero. If people are asked how much they are willing to pay in order to not get disconnected, the current record in spot price are 580.55 per MWh (that is market price before taxes, connection fees, and so on). How long voters would accept a elevated price is a question that many countries in EU saw answered following the energy crisis.
So the best value for the money is the cheapest one that provide the service that people demand when all the costs are accounted for, and that does not cause voters to elect a new governments in order to have it solved.
No good answer to which is better for the money. I say bring it all.
Diversity in renewable energy sources is important for grid resilience. Some areas are gonna be terrible for solar and good for wind. Some areas might not have proper water access for nuclear.
Wind and solar are extremely unstable. Spain had a country-wide blackout earlier this year because of reactors being off. Days with peak solar and wind (heavily subsidized) made nuclear not viable. But you need a stable source to keep the grid from collapsing (and not fry appliances), like nuclear or hydro. It's like both a pace-maker and a goakeeper.
So you need a mix. Small reactors fix the problem of NIMBY caused by decades of fearmongering (now slowly reversing).
Nuclear and security, that’s a good one especially nowadays when companies tend to connect everything to the internet and drone wars are a thing since the war in Ukraine.
Nuclear is an industry that strangled itself with red tape and harmful PR, making every project fiendishly expensive and take so many decades that cost-of-capital costs are insane.
I don't think it will ever again beat solar+wind+battery for grid scale carbon-free power pricing.
Even if it had never had those issues, nuclear power would still be the textbook example of a fragile system - capital-intensive, centralized projects that can be shut down by disruption to fuel shipments halfway round the world, droughts in the cooling system's water sources, or any of a dozen unions of specialized workers going on strike. Add to that iteration cycles measured in decades instead of years and it's hard to imagine how Nuclear could ever even close the gap, let alone pull ahead.
I have a theory that smart financiers avoid nuclear because getting a new version done on time and under budget is so damn hard, and smart physicists gravitate to nuclear for the same reason. I wish the nuclear-curious factions would pivot to a project Orion style endeavor instead of powering a UK hamlet sometime in the 2030s. Now there's something insanely difficult and likely to fail that I wouldn't mind my tax dollars being spent on.
Capitalism is extremely poor at "fragile systems", and for whatever reason (water under the bride now) the nuclear industry never made the move to smaller modular systems - even for large installations (think a reactor hall with 20 small cores rather than a single large core).
Even this project sounds like a custom on-site build, although at the moment it is still vapourware.
> I don't think it will ever again beat solar+wind+battery for grid scale carbon-free power pricing.
The problem the UK has is their climate: Northerly enough that solar makes 5x as much power in the summer as it does in the winter, and much more demand for heating in the winter than cooling in the summer.
Batteries are fine for storing solar in the day and using it at night - but much less good for summer-to-winter storage. And the UK isn't exactly eager to start flooding desolate valleys for pumped storage reservoirs either.
Oh, and they don't just need to decarbonise their existing electricity output - they also need to greatly increase their electricity output to hit their goals on EV and heat pump adoption; and they need to lower electricity prices too.
This was my impression as well, both watching Smarter Every Day and visiting a nuclear power plant myself and taking the tour.
Yes, safety is important, but I think they're far into diminishing returns territory, and we have to take the penalty in both energy cost and security.
Well, at least for Germany it was the actual nuclear fallout over large areas of the country after Chernobyl. Which is btw still measurable today. [1] That's a pretty scary thing to happen to you and one just has to accept that these are the actual lived experiences of people that form their opinions.
I think it was mostly caused by fear about nuclear Armageddon during the cold war - it's hard to feel like the world could end at any second due to nuclear bombs while also feeling grateful for nuclear electricity generation. Would be even if there was no overlap between military and civilian nuclear industries, which of course there is.
Producing power by the mid 2030s? Isn't the entire point of SMRs that they are effectively a complete package and it takes very little effort to ship them out and getting them to produce power. Or is this just a pipe-dream we were sold?
Like, I imagined these things being compact enough to be shipped to the outskirts of towns and producing power. Afterall, they are from the same technology that was powering nuclear subs, right?
This Rolls Royce design isn't all that "small." A RR SMR design is a 470MWe PWR. About half the size of a typical PWR reactor. Fukushima Daiichi Unit 1 was 460MWe. Calling this an "SMR" is a stretch, likely for PR purposes.
It's a rather conventional design, low enriched fuel, no exotic coolants. There is a paper on it at NRC[1]. And they've never built one, so if they get it running by the 2030's they'll be doing pretty well for a Western company.
Closer to a third for recent models (the French P4 reactors from the 80s were 1300, the later N4 1450~1500, the EPR is 1650). 500-ish is a relatively typical density for reactors from the mid to late 60s.
The reactor is still to be developed by Rolls Royce, which is hidden in mid article. The don't have plans, not even a working prototype yet, so expect delays to at least the mid 2040s.
> Isn't the entire point of SMRs that they are effectively a complete package and it takes very little effort to ship them out and getting them to produce power.
That's the point if / when we have actually working SMRs, with production lines set up. But the limited development of small civilian reactors before the 80s and the 3 decades freeze on most things nuclear means SMRs are only just getting out of research status (e.g. in the US only NuScale's VOYGR are currently certified).
This has kind of been the problem with SMRs; they sound great, but as you develop them, they get less and less small and modular. These are 470MWe. Coincidentally, the (very old) 'normal' MAGNOX reactors which used to operate at this site were 490MWe; in their day they were considered quite large.
> Afterall, they are from the same technology that was powering nuclear subs, right?
That was just for the news headlines, nuclear isn't and never has been, "practical". Look on the bright side, so much taxpayer money will go into this, it's probably going to make someone richer.
Nuclear subs are a "money no object" technology, as our supposed insurance policy against Soviet invasion and/or armageddon, it's whatever it takes.
That technology is so expensive, so far from economically viable, that only two countries (US & France) are even using it for aircraft carriers, despite its potential huge advantages over oil (stay at sea for years at a time without refuelling, no need for vulnerable supply ships etc.)
> "The old nuclear power plant at Wylfa was switched off in 2015"
Tangentially—this is a brownfield site, where there once was an early generation of nuclear fission reactor, cooled by CO2 gas. Here's a brief description of what those machines looked like (not this exact one):
I believe the more technologically advanced we live the more energy we will use. Travel requires energy, ai models require energy, healthy food requires energy
The cheaper and more abundant we can make electricity, the faster we can reap the benefits of new technology
imo nuclear is an important part to have abundant energy at all times
50 or 100 years from now we may run out of solar and wind resources to tap. We may consume a couple order of magnitudes more energy than now. Materials science may have unforeseen advances that make nuclear development safer and cheaper.
Nuclear will find its place in the sun - so to speak - at that time. But not now I think. The numbers don't work.
I suspect that the push for civilian SMRs is a disguised subsidy for the naval reactor programme. This is shortsighted because (1) for electricity renewables are cheaper than nuclear, and (2) large naval vessels are enormously vulnerable to drones.
Ukraine's success against Russia's Black Sea fleet proves this for surface vessels. Similarly, it is easy to imagine a swarm of small underwater drones detecting, tracking and trailing nuclear submarines.
The UK government's is more focussed on providing juicy contracts to large corporations than realistic preparations for the future.
> This is shortsighted because [...] electricity renewables are cheaper than nuclear
This is an oversimplification - Renewables are cheaper than nuclear, but they are also less reliable than nuclear in the sense that when the wind stops blowing, power stops being generated. Also if you include the cost of energy storage to survive a week or two without substantial wind, suddenly it's not the cheaper anymore.
A mixed nuclear + renewables grid would reduce the total cost because nuclear can provide a stable base load which isn't affected by seasonality. Modern plants can also ramp up/down to some extent to balance the overall system.
That's why you need an energy mix rather than just putting all your eggs in a single source.
Either you build enough nuclear to cover 95% of peak demand and essentially only run it a few weeks a year (because most of the time you have plenty of renewable supply) for terrible ROI or you need storage and peaker plants anyway. Nuclear energy is mostly interesting for cross subsidizing a military nuclear program by keeping relevant skills in domestic supply.
What good is a “base load” when the problem is peak demand. You’re saying nuclear gets to take the easy stuff and another industry can worry about peaker plants.
I suspect you need far ledd in peaker capacity - both GW and GWh - with a 100% wind than 100% nuclear if you spend the same amount on wind and nuclear.
nuclear energy still causes a lot of prompt heating
other forms of renewables could generate electricity while cooling the planet.
a super chimney (perhaps suspended with balloons) piercing the tropopause and carrying either air in open or closed loop fashion, or a "refrigerant" (not necessarily a harmful one, could just be moist air, or any other medium of thermal exchange, like a gravity assisted heat siphon) in a closed loop could generate power while cooling the planet, it would also be base load given the large temperature difference between surface level and tropopause (which persists day and night, summer and winter). Obviously this can also be used to desalinate sea water by freeze desalination.
as soon as such technology takes off and multiple blocs make use of such technology, they will probably even get into arguments about how long or what fraction of the time each nation state is allowed to generate power this way (arguing it was our Western excessive CO2 consumption to which we have to thank this excess heat availability, and India countering that we should take into account their proper share of excess CO2 due to the underground coal mines that have been burning uncontrollably for decades on end, etc...) to the point of nation states attacking each others superchimneys.
If you invest in battery and storage tech you'll get reliable storage long before the first "baseload nukes" start contributing to the grid.
Storage tech has been criminally underfunded and under-researched. There are many, many options. But because of poor investment decisions and lobbying from the usual suspects the tech is around twenty years behind where it could be.
> I suspect that the push for civilian SMRs is a disguised subsidy for the naval reactor programme
It absolutely isn’t. There is very little crossover between the RR SMR (which is 470 MWe, not really an ‘SMR’ by IAEA definition) and a submarine reactor core. Sub cores are smaller and optimised for different conditions. They’re vastly different tech. The teams at RR working on these are totally distinct with no crossover.
RR just got £9B for sub NSSS work. They don’t need a back door subsidy when they have a big cheque coming right through the front door!
If anything, UK govt is prioritising domestic technology, whether or not that’s the best from a purely economic point of view.
It is all about having the workforce able to deliver on the military ambitions.
This has been well known for a while, and western governments have started to say the quiet part out loud to justify the insanely large handouts required to build civillian nucleaar power.
As an Ontario resident I wish they chose to build more CANDUs (which, AIUI, they are planning to do as well) rather than SMRs: our grid is in more need of 'bulk power', and SMRs are better suited to small grids (like the Canadian Maritimes) or small sites (like in Poland: replacing previous smaller scale coal plants).
People often underestimate the amount of storage you need for renewables. Depending on the geographic location you might be looking at tens of TWh. The cost for renewables then suddenly becomes much higher.
I recommend everyone who is using the cost argument to actually do the math on this first. It might be an eye opening experience. It certainly was for me.
Could you share your numbers as well? According to [1], the UK currently needs about 300TWh per year. Lets say we go entirely solar+wind+battery(whatever that means) and assume that battery has to bridge a gap of at most 7 days (meaning no wind and no solar at all during this time, which is at most a few days at a time). This adds up to 300/365*7= 5,8TWh of max capacity. Lets take it safe, round up and say we need 10TWh (which is already not "tens of TWH", but "ten"). [2] Says that grid-scale batteries come at around 350$ per kWh right now. kWh -> TWh is factor 1 billion (10^9), meaning if we want to build 10TWh of storage, it will cost 3,5 Trillion Dollars. Impressive number indeed. But there are multiple asterisks here.
1. This calculation takes into account that there is no exchange with mainland europe and no gas power plants or other sources of power (e.g. hydro or hydro storage). This sharply reduces the need for batteries.
2. Battery costs will fall in the next decades, compared to nuclear, which will take a long time (if ever) until costs will fall.
The problem is that the math is often done using faulty assumptions, such as expecting to rely solely on batteries to store enough energy to last several months.
In practice there are never long periods with and zero wind and zero solar and zero import capacity. Place the right price on electricity during peak demand, and suddenly the market is more than happy to install an overcapacity of wind & solar. Gigawatt-capacity cables to neighboring countries? Already being built!
A country like the UK needs an average electricity input of 45GW. It is totally fine to serve that with 60GW of wind operating at 25% capacity, 60GW of solar operating at 25% capacity, and 15GW of import operating at 100% capacity.
Ukraine's success proves that you need to actually have people guarding ships against intrusion. This is not a new lesson ever since the Raid on the Medway.
It's dangerous to extrapolate much from the performance of the Russian Navy in the Black Sea. While Ukraine has had remarkable success in almost completely shutting down Russian naval activity in the Black Sea, it's not all due to the superiority of drones. Russian incompetence, both in naval strategy as well as operations is endemic, and the fate of the Moskva and other systems isn't indicative of a widespread vulnerability of surface vessels to drone systems. The Moskva was sunk with cruise missiles, primarily ones developed from Soviet era missiles (Kh-35). Much has been written about the materiel state of the Moskva, as well as operational decisions/inadequacies that lead to its demise.
Surface drones work well when air cover is limited/restricted. Tracking them via radar is difficult due to surface noise, but it can be done. Countering them isn't an impossible task either, it, like other threats are handled systematically. The Russians have a relatively slow OODA loop, and Ukraine has been very successful in leveraging their superiority.
Is the threat a universal one or limited to the UKR/Russian conflict? A little of both. We've seen where an unprepared ship can be easily damaged by a small boat laden with explosives (USS Cole). We've seen the Ukrainians shut down Russian activity in the Black Sea, even going so far as to down unwitting aircraft that didn't respect the threat. But militaries adapt, especially to proven threats. Witness how the West responded to the sinking of the Eilat in 1973. It developed countermeasures and weapon systems for the threat of cruise missiles, while simultaneously developing their own cruise missiles (Harpoon/Exocet/Otomat/Penguin).
Will undersea drones prove as concerning? I doubt small swarms of UUVs will proliferate like we've seen with FPV drones. Flying through the air is much much easier than operating in water. Propulsion, C2, and targeting is quite difficult underwater compared to UAVs. Both range and payload are a challenge, so I don't believe that a swarm of "small underwater drones" will be able to detect the quietest ships in the ocean any time soon, much less track and trail something that can travel at speeds above 40kts with ease.
Now will large UUVs have a role in future naval combat? Undoubtedly.
As for point one they are much less reliable because they are intermittent. I'm skeptical of how much cheaper renewables are. I haven't noticed energy prices declining recently. Correct me if i'm misinformed. I'm slightly confused by point 2. What are you saying, because soviet technology is getting sunk a lot we should stop bothering with having a navy?
Either way you are giving way to much credit to the power of the UK military industrial complex.
Storage is cheaper than peaking power which is why it’s common to add huge battery bank to solar power plants. It’s simply more profitable to add storage.
Net result renewables currently save you money until ~80% annual electricity supply. At which point adding more batteries and generation to cover overnight demand is cheaper than adding nuclear to the mix. In such a mix, Nuclear saves a little per kWh overnight and cost way more per kWh during the day, net result it’s more expensive as baseload. But, operating nuclear only at night drives up per kWh costs above storage.
Due to plant lifespans, new nuclear is already a poor investment which is why it’s rare, which then drives up construction costs. It’s a viscus cycle which ultimately dooms nuclear without massive subsidies which become hard to justify.
And the prevalence of batteries in Texas means that they must be cost effective, because all grid assets in Texas are from private investors risking their own capital, and there is zero incentive for batteries except for their profit generative capacity.
Continue generation is great if you have continues demand. The U.K. does not have that (especially if you include heating and travel which is currently mainly provided by gas)
Roughly: the demand is about 33-35GW. That’s projected to become 50GW by 2050 as transportation and home heating become electrified. So that’s the puck we’re skating towards.
Nuclear supplies a constant 10% of the demand today (more, if you count imports from France). The goal is to power 20% of the 50GW demand through nuclear. If it’s cheap, even more. Each of these Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) generates 470MW, so we’d need about 20 of them.
The plan is to set up a factory near Sheffield and produce the reactor parts like IKEA, so they can be assembled on site. The hope is that manufacturing and assembling the same product repeatedly makes people more efficient. That’s the main problem with nuclear - over budget and delays - that SMRs aim to fix.
I’m glad the UK is taking electrification seriously, and is investing in domestic industry that will hopefully export reactors if it’s successful. Some folks might look at the estimated date of completion (2035) and get discouraged, but I wouldn’t. The best time to plant this tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
Misleading how? That’s precisely how SMRs differ from traditional plants - they’re manufactured in a factory instead of being constructed on-site. That’s exactly like the difference between IKEA and constructing furniture from scratch using blocks of wood.
That was the SMR dream, but it largely hasn't worked out, for various reasons. Most 'SMR' designs have grown to suspiciously close to er, normal nuclear reactors.
Readit News
The whole of Europe needs to get on with energy security and Britain can and should be a leader here, next to Netherlands, Sweden and France.
[0] https://chrisbond.substack.com/p/desnz-to-include-some-reali...
Another potential advantage is building energy generation closer to where it is needed as Britain is unable to build good interconnection infrastructure. I think this doesn’t actually happen so much – the main places you need power are where there are people, which is bad in the ‘people _really_ hate nuclear’ front, and regulators are very conservative and more wary the more people live nearby.
Wind+batteries is a bit viable (and helps with interconnect too in that if you can max out interconnect utilization by transferring energy from generation to storage near usage even when there is no immediate demand, you can move more energy with a given interconnect per day than if you only used it to directly move energy from generators to users) but estimates of battery storage required still seem potentially prohibitively high.
The service that the money is paying for is to have a grid that is always producing enough energy for any demand at any given time. Having 10gw/h today but 0 tomorrow is worth close to zero. If people are asked how much they are willing to pay in order to not get disconnected, the current record in spot price are 580.55 per MWh (that is market price before taxes, connection fees, and so on). How long voters would accept a elevated price is a question that many countries in EU saw answered following the energy crisis.
So the best value for the money is the cheapest one that provide the service that people demand when all the costs are accounted for, and that does not cause voters to elect a new governments in order to have it solved.
Deleted Comment
Diversity in renewable energy sources is important for grid resilience. Some areas are gonna be terrible for solar and good for wind. Some areas might not have proper water access for nuclear.
So you need a mix. Small reactors fix the problem of NIMBY caused by decades of fearmongering (now slowly reversing).
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/09/ukraine-war-br...
Didn’t here similar about wind and photovoltaics
Dead Comment
I don't think it will ever again beat solar+wind+battery for grid scale carbon-free power pricing.
I have a theory that smart financiers avoid nuclear because getting a new version done on time and under budget is so damn hard, and smart physicists gravitate to nuclear for the same reason. I wish the nuclear-curious factions would pivot to a project Orion style endeavor instead of powering a UK hamlet sometime in the 2030s. Now there's something insanely difficult and likely to fail that I wouldn't mind my tax dollars being spent on.
And their condition is for us to accept their highly subsidized products (cars, solar), which make our manufacturers go bankrupt.
It also makes us lose manufacturing capacity for dual use products like drones etc.
Even this project sounds like a custom on-site build, although at the moment it is still vapourware.
The problem the UK has is their climate: Northerly enough that solar makes 5x as much power in the summer as it does in the winter, and much more demand for heating in the winter than cooling in the summer.
Batteries are fine for storing solar in the day and using it at night - but much less good for summer-to-winter storage. And the UK isn't exactly eager to start flooding desolate valleys for pumped storage reservoirs either.
Oh, and they don't just need to decarbonise their existing electricity output - they also need to greatly increase their electricity output to hit their goals on EV and heat pump adoption; and they need to lower electricity prices too.
I can see why they'd hedge their bets.
Yes, safety is important, but I think they're far into diminishing returns territory, and we have to take the penalty in both energy cost and security.
[1] https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush...
https://atomicinsights.com/gazprom-profiting-mightily-from-g...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/world/europe/schroder-ger...
Like, I imagined these things being compact enough to be shipped to the outskirts of towns and producing power. Afterall, they are from the same technology that was powering nuclear subs, right?
It's a rather conventional design, low enriched fuel, no exotic coolants. There is a paper on it at NRC[1]. And they've never built one, so if they get it running by the 2030's they'll be doing pretty well for a Western company.
[1] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2521/ML25212A115.pdf
I think you mean it will be record construction time for a western company in the last few decades.
Closer to a third for recent models (the French P4 reactors from the 80s were 1300, the later N4 1450~1500, the EPR is 1650). 500-ish is a relatively typical density for reactors from the mid to late 60s.
Agree that it’s hardly small or modular tho.
Step 1: Find and reserve site of nuclear plant
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Power!
That's the point if / when we have actually working SMRs, with production lines set up. But the limited development of small civilian reactors before the 80s and the 3 decades freeze on most things nuclear means SMRs are only just getting out of research status (e.g. in the US only NuScale's VOYGR are currently certified).
> Afterall, they are from the same technology that was powering nuclear subs, right?
Not usually, no; that wouldn't be cost-effective.
The reason being that the nuclear sub reactors run on very enriched uranium which is very expensive and not fun if some got away.
That technology is so expensive, so far from economically viable, that only two countries (US & France) are even using it for aircraft carriers, despite its potential huge advantages over oil (stay at sea for years at a time without refuelling, no need for vulnerable supply ships etc.)
Tangentially—this is a brownfield site, where there once was an early generation of nuclear fission reactor, cooled by CO2 gas. Here's a brief description of what those machines looked like (not this exact one):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29890470 ("Nothing like this will be built again"—263 comments)
Had a tour of the place back in the day before 9/11 and all that made the world a lot less fun.
The cheaper and more abundant we can make electricity, the faster we can reap the benefits of new technology
imo nuclear is an important part to have abundant energy at all times
Nuclear will find its place in the sun - so to speak - at that time. But not now I think. The numbers don't work.
Ukraine's success against Russia's Black Sea fleet proves this for surface vessels. Similarly, it is easy to imagine a swarm of small underwater drones detecting, tracking and trailing nuclear submarines.
The UK government's is more focussed on providing juicy contracts to large corporations than realistic preparations for the future.
This is an oversimplification - Renewables are cheaper than nuclear, but they are also less reliable than nuclear in the sense that when the wind stops blowing, power stops being generated. Also if you include the cost of energy storage to survive a week or two without substantial wind, suddenly it's not the cheaper anymore.
A mixed nuclear + renewables grid would reduce the total cost because nuclear can provide a stable base load which isn't affected by seasonality. Modern plants can also ramp up/down to some extent to balance the overall system.
That's why you need an energy mix rather than just putting all your eggs in a single source.
I suspect you need far ledd in peaker capacity - both GW and GWh - with a 100% wind than 100% nuclear if you spend the same amount on wind and nuclear.
Still seems like a worthwhile pursuit though
other forms of renewables could generate electricity while cooling the planet.
a super chimney (perhaps suspended with balloons) piercing the tropopause and carrying either air in open or closed loop fashion, or a "refrigerant" (not necessarily a harmful one, could just be moist air, or any other medium of thermal exchange, like a gravity assisted heat siphon) in a closed loop could generate power while cooling the planet, it would also be base load given the large temperature difference between surface level and tropopause (which persists day and night, summer and winter). Obviously this can also be used to desalinate sea water by freeze desalination.
as soon as such technology takes off and multiple blocs make use of such technology, they will probably even get into arguments about how long or what fraction of the time each nation state is allowed to generate power this way (arguing it was our Western excessive CO2 consumption to which we have to thank this excess heat availability, and India countering that we should take into account their proper share of excess CO2 due to the underground coal mines that have been burning uncontrollably for decades on end, etc...) to the point of nation states attacking each others superchimneys.
Storage tech has been criminally underfunded and under-researched. There are many, many options. But because of poor investment decisions and lobbying from the usual suspects the tech is around twenty years behind where it could be.
It absolutely isn’t. There is very little crossover between the RR SMR (which is 470 MWe, not really an ‘SMR’ by IAEA definition) and a submarine reactor core. Sub cores are smaller and optimised for different conditions. They’re vastly different tech. The teams at RR working on these are totally distinct with no crossover.
RR just got £9B for sub NSSS work. They don’t need a back door subsidy when they have a big cheque coming right through the front door!
If anything, UK govt is prioritising domestic technology, whether or not that’s the best from a purely economic point of view.
This has been well known for a while, and western governments have started to say the quiet part out loud to justify the insanely large handouts required to build civillian nucleaar power.
https://theconversation.com/military-interests-are-pushing-n...
Ontario, Canada is building a bunch of BWRX-300 SMRs and don't really have a desire for a naval reactor programme:
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/carney-ford-announce-...
* https://www.opg.com/projects-services/projects/nuclear/smr/d...
* https://www.gevernova.com/news/press-releases/ge-vernova-hit...
Canada is currently looking at new submarines, and the final two candidates are both SSKs (and not nuclear SSNs):
* https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2025/08/28/canada-shortlis...
* https://www.canada.ca/en/public-services-procurement/news/20...
As an Ontario resident I wish they chose to build more CANDUs (which, AIUI, they are planning to do as well) rather than SMRs: our grid is in more need of 'bulk power', and SMRs are better suited to small grids (like the Canadian Maritimes) or small sites (like in Poland: replacing previous smaller scale coal plants).
Those are called torpedoes.
I recommend everyone who is using the cost argument to actually do the math on this first. It might be an eye opening experience. It certainly was for me.
1. This calculation takes into account that there is no exchange with mainland europe and no gas power plants or other sources of power (e.g. hydro or hydro storage). This sharply reduces the need for batteries. 2. Battery costs will fall in the next decades, compared to nuclear, which will take a long time (if ever) until costs will fall.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/322874/electricity-consu... [2] https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy25osti/93281.pdf
In practice there are never long periods with and zero wind and zero solar and zero import capacity. Place the right price on electricity during peak demand, and suddenly the market is more than happy to install an overcapacity of wind & solar. Gigawatt-capacity cables to neighboring countries? Already being built!
A country like the UK needs an average electricity input of 45GW. It is totally fine to serve that with 60GW of wind operating at 25% capacity, 60GW of solar operating at 25% capacity, and 15GW of import operating at 100% capacity.
Surface drones work well when air cover is limited/restricted. Tracking them via radar is difficult due to surface noise, but it can be done. Countering them isn't an impossible task either, it, like other threats are handled systematically. The Russians have a relatively slow OODA loop, and Ukraine has been very successful in leveraging their superiority.
Is the threat a universal one or limited to the UKR/Russian conflict? A little of both. We've seen where an unprepared ship can be easily damaged by a small boat laden with explosives (USS Cole). We've seen the Ukrainians shut down Russian activity in the Black Sea, even going so far as to down unwitting aircraft that didn't respect the threat. But militaries adapt, especially to proven threats. Witness how the West responded to the sinking of the Eilat in 1973. It developed countermeasures and weapon systems for the threat of cruise missiles, while simultaneously developing their own cruise missiles (Harpoon/Exocet/Otomat/Penguin).
Will undersea drones prove as concerning? I doubt small swarms of UUVs will proliferate like we've seen with FPV drones. Flying through the air is much much easier than operating in water. Propulsion, C2, and targeting is quite difficult underwater compared to UAVs. Both range and payload are a challenge, so I don't believe that a swarm of "small underwater drones" will be able to detect the quietest ships in the ocean any time soon, much less track and trail something that can travel at speeds above 40kts with ease.
Now will large UUVs have a role in future naval combat? Undoubtedly.
Either way you are giving way to much credit to the power of the UK military industrial complex.
https://www.statista.com/chart/35117/levelized-cost-of-energ...
Net result renewables currently save you money until ~80% annual electricity supply. At which point adding more batteries and generation to cover overnight demand is cheaper than adding nuclear to the mix. In such a mix, Nuclear saves a little per kWh overnight and cost way more per kWh during the day, net result it’s more expensive as baseload. But, operating nuclear only at night drives up per kWh costs above storage.
Due to plant lifespans, new nuclear is already a poor investment which is why it’s rare, which then drives up construction costs. It’s a viscus cycle which ultimately dooms nuclear without massive subsidies which become hard to justify.
2025 is the year that storage is really being deployed in a serious manner in the US, more than 18GW most likely:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65964
You can see on the map at the bottom of this page that almost all the batteries are in areas that already have high amounts of renewables:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586
And the prevalence of batteries in Texas means that they must be cost effective, because all grid assets in Texas are from private investors risking their own capital, and there is zero incentive for batteries except for their profit generative capacity.
Are they still if you include storage, vs. nuclear's continuous generation?
Roughly: the demand is about 33-35GW. That’s projected to become 50GW by 2050 as transportation and home heating become electrified. So that’s the puck we’re skating towards.
Nuclear supplies a constant 10% of the demand today (more, if you count imports from France). The goal is to power 20% of the 50GW demand through nuclear. If it’s cheap, even more. Each of these Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) generates 470MW, so we’d need about 20 of them.
The plan is to set up a factory near Sheffield and produce the reactor parts like IKEA, so they can be assembled on site. The hope is that manufacturing and assembling the same product repeatedly makes people more efficient. That’s the main problem with nuclear - over budget and delays - that SMRs aim to fix.
I’m glad the UK is taking electrification seriously, and is investing in domestic industry that will hopefully export reactors if it’s successful. Some folks might look at the estimated date of completion (2035) and get discouraged, but I wouldn’t. The best time to plant this tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
A more realistic target, one that would make this all more viable, would be 50MW and make 200 of them.
Ignoring cost, I sometimes wonder why we cant build this in 1 - 2 year. And if the first one takes 5 years, why the second one isn't 5 times faster.
It frustrates me that nothing in UK is done with any urgency. And I bet that the Estimate date will be off as well.