Reclaiming NIMBY – Nuclear in my Back Yard

What do Plymouth, Weymouth, Southampton and Portsmouth have in common?  They’re all South coast towns in England, and for the past fifty years they’ve all been happy to host small nuclear power plants within a few miles of their town centre.  In the not very distant future, they might be joined by a lot more British towns and cities as nuclear enters a new phase of rolling out SMRs – Small Modular Reactors.  That could be the best energy decision any Government has made for the last seventy years.

The small nuclear reactors these towns host aren’t connected to the grid – they’re the ones that power the UK’s fleet of nuclear submarines which visit these and other ports.  The concept behind an SMR is to scale these small reactors up to a level where they can be manufactured cost effectively as standard power plants which can be located wherever a baseload electricity generator is needed.

“ Where it is needed” is important.  Traditionally, power plants have been located in areas of heavy industry and high population, which minimised the distance electricity needs to flow, simplifying the construction of the grid.  As we move towards wind, particularly offshore turbines, generation moves further and further away from where electricity is consumed, requiring an expansion of the grid.  That’s challenging with today’s level of demand.  When you factor in the two to threefold increase in electricity usage that is likely to be needed as we decarbonise our lives and get rid of gas, we’re looking at a massive amount of new distribution capacity.

We saw one of the consequences of that separation of supply and demand in the recent public argument about zonal pricing, which is the proposal that electricity pricing should be based on where you live.  If you live in an area with high generation and low demand, prices would be lower, potentially attracting energy hungry industries to those areas.  If you live where there is higher demand but less generation, the opposite applies and energy prices go up.  The Guardian put this together in a useful graphic, which I’ve shown below.  It illustrates how demand (the downward blue arrows in the bars on the right) is matched to the generating capacity across the regions.  In most cases, it’s a poor match.  The further the blue arrow is to the right in each zone, the more your electricity will cost under zonal pricing.  If it is in the blue “thermal” zone, it could be considerably higher, as that implies more grid infrastructure.

One consequence of this mismatch between generation and demand is that windfarms are paid billions of pounds each year to turn off their turbines, as the infrastructure is not in place to transfer electricity to where it’s needed.  It is called a constraint payment, which becomes part of our energy bill.

The Government is due to rule on whether the market should move to zonal pricing later this year.  It is currently the subject of intense lobbying from disparate industry interests, having stoked some of the most divisive arguments the industry has ever seen.

The traditional route to solve this mismatch of supply and demand is to build a bigger grid.  The alternative is to add local generation where it’s needed, which is where small modular reactors come in.  They’re not doing much that is new – they’re based on well tested reactor technology.  Their main innovation is to allow them to be replicated easily, so that they can be manufactured cost effectively.  That’s in contrast to the history of building larger and larger one-off designs like Hinkley and Sizewell, which invariably overrun on cost and timescale.

One major problem the industry has to face iin deploying SMRs is the public perception of nuclear.  Despite being one of the safest (quite possibly the safest) form of power generation, Hollywood and the media like apocalyptic stories, preferably accompanied by mushroom clouds.  It hasn’t helped that many left-leaning strategists in the UK have continued to blame the nuclear industry for helping to undermine the miners during their action against Margaret Thatcher’s government, despite that being over fifty years ago.  All of which means that the nuclear industry needs to refresh its image.

Time is of the essence.  Few people think that Ed Miliband’s promise of 100% renewable energy generation by 2030 is anything but a wild dream.  Decades of indecision and a lack of a credible energy strategy mean that there is not much clarity of what we are likely to have in terms of grid or generation in 2030, other than a diminishing amount of nuclear, insufficient storage and an over-reliance on interconnect.  Which should play towards the SMR approach.

When Britain pressed the button to build the world’s first nuclear reactor at Calder Hall, things moved very quickly.  Design started in 1952, and four year later the reactor was built and providing electricity to the grid.  It continued to operate until 2003, running for almost two and a half times its designed lifetime. 

Timescales for building nuclear reactors have changed substantially since 1952.  The Government now requires a Generic Design Assessment (GDA) for Small Modular Reactors, looking in detail at the technical design proposals for each new offering.  The GDA, which is just the initial assessment stage, takes longer than it took for the entire design and construction of Calder Hall.  After the GDA is complete, we have the planning process, a nuclear site licence, followed by construction.  These elongated processes have been a major reason for nuclear falling out of favour.  The good news is that construction of an SMR should be relatively fast, as the whole basis of the concept is that they are assembled on site from pre-fabricated parts.  Most of the potential consortia entering the SMR market claim to be close to starting construction of their first SMR design somewhere in the world, so the truth of that should soon become apparent.

The black hole of British nuclear power

What is clear is that we will almost certainly not see an operational SMR in the UK in the next few years.  Even if an SMR were deployed at an existing nuclear site, (which should simplify the planning appraisal), it is unlikely to come on-line before 2031 or 2032 at the very earliest.  We have five nuclear reactors still operating, all run by EDF, each rated at around 1.2GW operational capacity.  As I’m writing this, those five are providing 17% of our total electricity demand.  Four of them are already operating well past their design life, because we need them too much to shut them down.  Hartlepool and Heysham 1’s operating licences have been extended to next March, while Torness and Heysham 2 are both  scheduled to close in 2030 (after having already had their licences extended).  That will leave Sizewell B, as the UK’s only nuclear power station with generating capacity.  That’s a sorry indictment on successive decades of failed political energy strategy.  Without nuclear’s baseload support, it means that Britain is entering uncharted waters with its generating mix.

It wasn’t meant to happen like this.  In December 2024, when the new Hinkley Point C reactor was scheduled to be completed in 2027, Ed Miliband stated that “We can’t achieve clean power by 2030 without nuclear, which provides an all-important steady supply of homegrown clean energy”.  With the extended delays at Hinkley, we no longer have the expected smooth transition.  Instead, we are looking at a gap of between one and two years where Sizewell B will be the only operating nuclear reactor, supporting only 3% of total demand. Not the 17% that Mr Miliband had assumed when he made that statement.  That’s assuming that the application to extend Sizewell’s life is accepted, as its operating licence ends this year.  If it’s not extended, then we have no nuclear generation in 2030.

If Ed Miliband’s statement that “We can’t achieve clean power by 2030 without nuclear” is correct, then we’re not going to get clean power by 2030.  I’m sure that EDF are lobbying hard to keep Heysham 2 and Torness running for a few more years to help Mr Miliband out of his hole, but they’ll be looking for more billions of subsidy to do so, further inflating our energy bills.

Changing the public perception of SMRs

It is clear that money would be better spent on accelerating the SMR program.  One important part of that is to change  to change public attitudes.  Two recent events should help to drive that engagement.

The first argument is one we’ve already seen, which is the threat of regional pricing, where your electricity bill will depend on your postcode.  The South is particularly  at risk from this policy, as current grid strategy is to build massive grid infrastructure to redirect the output from Scottish windfarms.  The alternative is to look at local, renewable generation, where the only option is SMRs.  Every town should have one, not just the lucky South coast submarine ports.

The second is far more important, as it talks to our energy security.

The recent blackout in Spain should be a rallying call to look at our grid.  We don’t yet know what caused it, but the grid did what it was designed to do and shut down quickly and safely, without major damage.  The problem comes with restoring power after such a large black-out, as any surges can trigger another shut down. 

The process is called a “Black Start”.  Individual power plants need to be isolated and brought back on line gradually, slowly reconnecting them with homes, business and industry, then connecting them together as the individual islands of restored power combine into a fully functional grid.  It has to be a gradual process, as nobody knows exactly what the demand will be as each area is turned back on.  Any unexpected imbalance could cause a secondary shutdown.  So it is necessarily a slow process.

The graph below, which the BBC produced from the Spanish grid data illustrates why it took so long.  These individual reconnections are built up slowly until the overall transmission of electrical power is back on the normal demand curve.

Here, the blue line is the anticipated demand for the day.  The red line shows the actual demand.  It falls dramatically ay 12.55, and takes fifteen hours to carefully converge with the anticipated minimum, just after 3.00 the following morning.  The graph charts the entire demand figures for Spain, showing that around 60% of demand was lost. 

Black Starts are difficult.  It’s not just turning a generator back on.  In most cases it need quite a lot of electricity to start everything up, in much the same way that our soon to be obsolete petrol and diesel cars need a big battery and a starter motor.  For most types of power generation, including wind, that typically comes from hydro and pumped storage.  However, as the mix of generation evolves, the black start capabilities need updating.  We are currently moving into uncharted territory, with a transmission grid which was designed for a very different form of generation.  As electricity usage rises and we incorporate more renewables into the generation mix, it’s highly likely that we will see more black-out events similar to the one in Spain.   That will teach us a lot more about how to manage black starts.  One thing that will almost certainly help is having distributed generation close to demand, making these start-up islands of power easier to manage.  An SMR with sufficient nearby battery storage should make things a lot easier.

It’s good that we have renamed our Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) to stress this.  They need to look hard at the Energy Security part of their remit.  It’s not just about having enough capacity to meet demand, which is all that is normally talked about, but how quickly we can recover should large scale black-outs occur.  Most Spaniards probably think their energy industry did a poor job of getting power back online.  I suspect many in the industry are quietly congratulating them and breathing a sigh of relief that it didn’t happen in their country.  There for the grace of God…

In time we will learn what the next generation grid will need to look like, but without nuclear to provide a stable baseload, that learning process may be a bumpy one.  SMRs have the potential to make it a lot more manageable.  We’ve ignored nuclear for too long.  It’s time to recognise that without it we are unlikely to achieve affordable or secure energy.  We need to finish the GDAs for the four current contenders and start the first builds to prove the process.  While that is happening, we also need to start emphasising the benefits.   Otherwise, the future might be darker than we would like.

Did someone just turn the lights out?