UK's first small nuclear power station to be built in north Wales

The question is what’s better value for money, wind and solar (potentially with storage when required), or nuclear.

Truly great news. Less competition in the renewable energy sector for us.

I dont understand this cult like love for nuclear energy. Its the same behavior Tesla lovers or Apple lovers have, just ignoring all the issues... I'd be a fan too if there weren't about 130000 barrels of nuclear waste rotting in an old salt mine threatening my fresh water supply. Also the Russian attack on the Ukraine has shown that these stations are easy targets. No thanks.

This Rolls Royce design isn't all that "small." A RR "SMR" is a 470MWe PWR. About half the size of a typical PWR reactor. 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

> 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).

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.

> 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.

I can see why they'd hedge their bets.

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.

Wasn't all that bad PR mostly caused by the coal/oil industry, doing some serious astroturfing for a decade or so?

Paying for a few security guards to sit next to the dry casks and point out that you'd better not crack them open and snort the contents for 50,000 generations will be peanuts compared to all the other expenses associated with keeping a society going for 50,000 generations.

If a generation is ~20 years then 50,000 generations is around a million years. We're talking several times longer than recorded history. In fact, I was curious and looked it up - Homo Sapiens is estimated to be around 300,000 years old [0]. We should be so lucky if there are humans around in 50,000 generations. Just by nature of the amount of stuff that happens, if they have any conception of what the UK was or any idea what happened there then there has been some sort of transcendental enlightenment where there are no longer limits on how many memories a human can retain.

In short, I think you are exaggerating the downsides of maybe a potential 10x cost blowout on the budget of a government project and a trivial amount of waste disposal.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human#Evolution

You’re talking about the unhindered release of CO2 into the atmosphere, I assume