Rolls-Royce awarded £210m to develop small modular reactors

More than half of the government’s fund to support advanced nuclear projects has been allocated to support Rolls-Royce’s small modular reactor (SMR) programme.

The engineering giant has been awarded £210 million of government funding by UK Research and Innovation to take forward phase two of the development of its SMR design.

The money has been allocated from the £385 million Advanced Nuclear Fund, which was announced last year in the prime minister’s Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution.

Combined with match funding from the private sector of £195 million, the investment will also be used to take Rolls-Royce’s SMR design through the regulatory processes required to assess its suitability for deployment in the UK.

The funding will kickstart work on entering the project into the Generic Design Assessment (GDA) process as well as identifying potential sites for the factories to manufacture the reactor modules.

The Rolls-Royce Group, energy investor BNF Resources UK and US Exelon Generation will invest the £195 million of match funding.

Rolls-Royce claims each SMR power station will be able to generate 470MW of low carbon electricity on a footprint equivalent to two football pitches – a tenth of the size of a conventional nuclear generation site.

The company, which has been building reactors for nuclear submarines since the 1950s, said nine-tenths of each plant will be built or assembled in factories before shipped to the site. This modular process is intended to cut the time and cost of construction, which are considered to be some of the main obstacles to the deployment of new nuclear generation.

In a debate earlier this year, the House of Lords heard that Rolls-Royce is exploring the roll out of SMRs at the Wylfa Newydd site on the Isle of Anglesey, where Hitachi recently abandoned plans to build a large nuclear plant.

The announcement of the funding for Rolls-Royce comes alongside the government’s move to roll out the Regulated Asset Base (RAB) model to finance nuclear projects, via legislation, which received its first parliamentary debate last week

The government also announced in last month’s budget that it is investing up to £1.7 billion to help get at least one large-scale nuclear project to a final investment decision.

Kwasi Kwarteng, secretary of state for business and energy, said: “In working with Rolls-Royce, we are proud to back the largest engineering collaboration the UK has ever seen – uniting some of the most respected and innovating organisations on the planet.

“Not only can we maximise British content, create new intellectual property and reinvigorate supply chains, but also position our country as a global leader in innovative nuclear technologies we can potentially export elsewhere.

“By harnessing British engineering and ingenuity, we can double down on our plan to deploy more home-grown, affordable clean energy in this country.”

Claiming that the SMR programme could create up to 40,000 jobs across the UK, Rolls-Royce chief executive Warren East said: “With the Rolls-Royce SMR technology, we have developed a clean energy solution which can deliver cost competitive and scalable net zero power for multiple applications from grid and industrial electricity production to hydrogen and synthetic fuel manufacturing.”

Tom Greatrex, chief executive of the Nuclear Industry Association, said: “Match funding for Rolls-Royce SMR sends a huge signal to private investors that the government wants SMRs alongside new large-scale stations to hit net zero. It also shows investors that the government believes in nuclear as a green technology.”