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.