They will never get built.
If they get built they will cost 10x what a reactor should.
Regardless, a bunch of consultation firms will get tens of millions ok UK taxpayer money.
Planned UK nuclear reactors unlikely to help hit green target, say MPs
Submitted 8 months ago by GreyShuck@feddit.uk to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk
Comments
Flyberius@hexbear.net 8 months ago
Ummdustry@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
I mean, it’s the UK. If we could get anything done that only cost 9x what it ought to that would be a national news story.
dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
Huh. I wonder if all of the verbatim identical pro-nuclear posts I see on every social media platform that all read like they were copied and pasted from the same template are astroturfing by the nuclear consultation firms.
Ummdustry@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Huh. I wonder if all of the verbatim identical anti-nuclear posts I see on every social media platform that all read like they were copied and pasted from the same template are astroturfing by the natural gas firms.
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 8 months ago
This is the best summary I could come up with:
MPs have warned that a planned fleet of small nuclear reactors are unlikely to contribute to hitting a key target in decarbonising Britain’s electricity generation, as the government opened talks to buy a site in Wales for a new power station.
The Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) said that ministers’ approach to developing factory-built nuclear power plants “lacks clarity” and their role in hitting a goal of moving the grid to clean energy by 2035 was unclear.
Last year a body, Great British Nuclear, was launched with the aim of delivering new power stations, including a fleet of small modular reactors (SMRs).
Philip Dunne, the chair of the EAC, said: “The UK has the opportunity to be a genuine world leader in the manufacture of SMR nuclear capability with great export potential.
“The first SMR is unlikely to be in operation by 2035, the date ministers have set for decarbonising the electricity supply: so what role will SMRs have in an energy mix dominated by renewables and supplemented by existing and emerging large-scale nuclear?”
Ministers now hope to strike a deal with Hitachi to acquire the land, with the intention of finding a partner to develop a nuclear power station there.
The original article contains 657 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 70%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
UndercoverUlrikHD@programming.dev 8 months ago
That argument is so old that you could have built three generations in that time. If you never start, it will allways be late.
Womble@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Just when gas prices were spiking and countries that were heavily invested into nuclear were making massive profits and their citizens spared the worst of the price increases, I was reminded of Cameron cancelling the new generation of nuclear power plants in ~2010 as they wouldn’t be ready until 2022.
UndercoverUlrikHD@programming.dev 8 months ago
Yeah, and then you ask which industry might have profited from it. I swear to God, if nuclear hadn’t been a real threat to the coal and petroleum industry 50 years ago, it would never have gotten the reputation it got. Imagine where we could have been.
Darkard@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The real issue for governments is that it takes longer than one election cycle for them to be built.
They are worried that they might spend all that money and then not be in power to reap the political benefit.
GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk 8 months ago
I swear this happened before “We won’t bother building them, as they wouldn’t even be online until 2020!”
Meanwhile in 2024, we’d quite like some power, please.
Diplomjodler@feddit.de 8 months ago
These projects never get started because they never make sense. SMRs are simply not a mature technology at all so investing in them when safer and cheaper alternatives already exist is irrational.
UndercoverUlrikHD@programming.dev 8 months ago
Nuclear power plants are top 2 in area footprint for energy generation. It’s clean, safe and a reliable baseload source. Personally I’d rather have nuclear power plant in the outskirts of my city than littering our nature with noisy bird killing windmills. Solar is cool, but won’t work as a baseload source.
SMR won’t mature without investments, it’s the sort of short sightedness that has made us burn coal and gas for 50 unnecessary extra years.
Ummdustry@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
I mean, the entire purpose behind SMR’s is pretty much to circumvent the political opposition to built-in-place reactors.
thehatfox@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Considering our current track record with building infrastructure, even if construction starts there’s a good chance it would never be completed.
New nuclear power would likely attract far greater degree of the sort of budget scrutiny and NIMBYist political opportunism that’s already derailed HS2.