Government is right to avoid ‘quick’ decision on SMRs

Slow progress on competition shows ministers are having "long hard scrub" at the evidence

The government is right to avoid rushing into a “quick and early decision” on small modular reactors (SMRs), a senior figure at the Energy Technologies Institute has said.

Slow progress on a competition to find a best value SMR design for the UK shows that the “evidence is being properly examined”.

“It is taking some time but the decision on whether you should intervene and how you should intervene is not an easy one,” said Energy Technologies Institute (ETI) nuclear strategy manager Mike Middleton at an event in London.

He said ministers were right to take the time to “properly examine the evidence and what the opportunities are, as well as the potential risks, rather than take a quick and early decision.”

The first phase of the competition to gauge market interest among developers, operators and investors was launched in last year’s budget. The results were due to be published sometime during the following autumn alongside a roadmap for the development of SMRs.

Both the results and the roadmap are yet to materialise, although in August the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy accidentally published, for a few hours, a list of eligible partipants for the competition. 

Giving evidence to a House of Lords science and technology committee last week, energy and industry minister Jesse Norman said that the competition’s timetable had been “disturbed” but that the government was hopeful it could get it “back on track soon”. He would not be drawn on when the results of the competition will be revealed.

Middleton said he saw the delay as a positive sign, as it demonstrated that the government was having “a long hard scrub” at the evidence. “If it were a no-brainer – a simple decision,” he added, “we’d have seen that some time ago.”

Earlier at the event, he had told delegates that SMRs would be “less cost-competitive” than large-scale nuclear for baseload power production, but that they had a “complimentary role” to play by delivering combined heat and power.

For that to happen would require “city-scale district heating systems to be part our long-term planning strategy for decarbonisation. The heat would get to those district heating systems through long hot water pipelines potentially up to 30 kilometres in length but on average much shorter than that.”

Middleton said public opinion will be “absolutely key” to the deployment of SMRs and that “a decision would be needed now on whether to begin enabling activities” to have one up and running by 2030.