SMR developer calls for planning rules to be relaxed

The government should loosen its site selection regime for nuclear power plants as delivering smaller modular reactors (SMR) becomes more feasible, a developer has urged.

MoltexFLEX director of commercial development Tris Denton issued the plea as the government draws up new principles governing where new plants should be sited.

Denton told the annual Nuclear Industries Association (NIA) conference that rather than prescribing sites where nuclear power should be located, like the existing national policy statement (NPS) does, there should instead be an “exclusionary” process to define those areas that are “not suitable” for SMRs.

“The planning considerations should be different [for SMRs],” he said. “There is a radiological element to both and that is a relevant similarity but there are a huge number of differences. To look at nuclear siting and nuclear consenting without the context of the vastly different scales within that will be naive.

“If you look at decarbonisation of industrial sectors, I struggle to see a very prescriptive world. I see a nuclear environment whereby off takers want a heat source or an electricity source and technology providers can provide that.

“If we genuinely want to reach 24GW and beyond, if we genuinely want to decarbonise industry, we need to take the siting discussion down exactly that pathway.”

Gwen Parry-Jones, interim CEO of Great British Nuclear (GBN), confirmed at the same conference that the government will be publishing its guiding principles on nuclear sites in January alongside two further key documents, setting out a roadmap for nuclear and another outlining routes to market.

MoltexFLEX wants to build reactors which use a ‘molten salt’ technology to produce very high temperatures would be the size of a medium-size house and therefore on a completely “different” scale to the likes of EDF’s new 3.2GW Hinkley Point C, Denton said.

Based on his past experience of nuclear related schemes, Denton said communities are less concerned about the source of power than is popularly supposed.

Alasdair Harper, a senior official at the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, said the government’s upcoming nuclear NPS should take account of the greater flexibility offered by small modular reactors (SMRs).

“We understand that the purpose of that policy statement is to take risk out of the planning process,” he said. “As industry strategies, technologies change, we need to think about what factors need to be reflected into that development consent process.

“From that perspective an exhaustive site list doesn’t fit with the concept of replicability, fleet approach and multiple deployments and so there’s something’s to work through there,” he said, referring to the greater flexibility offered by new nuclear technologies.

Patrick Looney, senior VP at GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, also urged the government to make a decision on the companies going through to the next stage of its SMR competition before the next general election.

GE Hitachi was one of the six companies shortlisted for the initial stage of the competition in October.

Looney said: “The election is coming they need to make a selection, you need to get going so things don’t change too much.

“Every time there’s a new government in any country, they all like to tinker with programmes and put their fingerprints on it so hopefully, they just leave GBN alone and proceed.”