Are we on the brink of a nuclear revival? | FT Film

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Are we on the brink of a nuclear revival?

Lately, we've been hearing a lot about this concept of small modular nuclear reactors.

SMRs are the future of nuclear power generation. We need all the nuclear power we can if the world has a hope of getting to net zero by 2050.

It won't be cheaper than the big ones, and the big ones are already the most expensive electricity we've ever known.

The demand for cloud storage and AI has gone up enormously. And that's why these tech companies are so interested in stable nuclear power.

Environmentalists should acknowledge that nuclear power is not the devil that they have held nuclear power to be.

It was going to generate cheap electricity. That's ultimately the promise. That has simply not happened.

I think nuclear industry has a bad name because it has wasted so many taxpayer dollars over time, and no one has ever apologised for it.

It's sometimes hard to grasp just how much power is gobbled up constantly by computer servers like these. These devices, they look so small, almost weightless, just a slab of glass. But everything you do on them, every email you send, every purchase you make, every movie you download is handled by vast physical data centres filled with servers like these. And the demand for power that's required could increase significantly as AI takes off. But where that new electricity is going to come from is still an open question.

The industry has been talking about a nuclear renaissance for about 25 years. Don't believe it. Since 2000, some 120 reactors or so have come online in the same period. That same number of reactors have been shut down permanently.

If you look at the share of electricity produced in the world, that was around 17 per cent in the mid-1990s. Today, it's only 9 per cent. This is not what a nuclear renaissance looks like. World leaders are promising and making pledges to triple nuclear capacity. All this is great, but so far it's just words. And for a nuclear revival, we will need more than words. We need to build.

I think we are experiencing one more cycle of talk about nuclear renaissance. We've seen this kind of cycle happen before. For example, in the beginning of the century, under both Tony Blair government in the UK and the George Bush administration in the United States, there was a lot of talk about nuclear renaissance. There were about 30 reactors ordered by utility companies around the United States.

In fact, only four of them went into construction. And of those four, two of them were abandoned after about $9bn were spent. The hype never seems to match with the reality.

We will not be able to solve global warming if we don't increase our use of nuclear power spectacularly. And this will be hard, given the dominance of fossil fuel companies and given the popularity of wind and solar.

The average nuclear plant takes about 10 years between the time you start pouring concrete in the ground and it starts generating power and supplying it to the grid. But usually there's another period of five or 10 years that is required to get the environmental clearances, to get the safety permissions, to, if you are going to a new site, finding a community that is willing to live near this very risky site, and last but not least, to raise the tens of billions of dollars you need, whereas renewables can be built much more quickly. So when you put money into nuclear power, you're not only starving renewables. You're also making it so much later for the emission reductions to happen.

The nuclear industry has a problem. Its power plants have a habit of running over budget and over time. But now it thinks it can fix this with so-called small modular reactors.

So my name is Paul Stein, and I founded a company called Floral Energy Limited, and I'm the CEO of that business. I was the chief technology officer of Rolls-Royce, and I spun out the Rolls-Royce small modular reactor business and became the chair of that business up until the end of 2023.

So a small modular reactor is one that is a shrunken version of a large reactor, but with some important differences. And the most important difference is it's constructed in a modular fashion, which reduces the capital cost. So it means all the parts of the reactor can be built in a factory environment, can be brought to site, bolted together on site, and that dramatically reduces the time to getting power on grid and the capital cost of the equipment.

And roughly how much does a small modular reactor cost?

So roughly in the order for, say, 500 megawatts of energy, it's around about 2 to 2 and a half billion pounds. The 'small' in small modular reactors actually is now misleading. Originally, the plan was to make quite physically small reactors that perhaps had less than 100 megawatts of energy.

But when the designs were taken to the next level of sophistication, it was realised that actually much larger power classes met the minimum price of electricity. So most of the practical SMR designs that are available today are in the 300 to 500 megawatt class. That's not small. I mean, that's powering a town the size of Leeds.

And how many of these SMRs are there actually operating in the world today?

Right now, there are no SMRs operating in the world today. They're all under development.

But there are still questions about the cost-effectiveness of small modular reactors.

Nuclear power plants are very expensive machines to build. The cost of the completed Vogtle Reactor is about $37bn. Hinkley Point C is even more expensive and counting. On an absolute scale, a small reactor should become less expensive compared to this. Though, because we don't have any real construction experience in any of the countries where we know the data, we don't really know how much it is going to cost.

Nevertheless, we have some ideas based on both engineering knowledge and past experience, and both of them suggest that, on a per unit of power capacity basis or per unit of energy, a small reactor will typically be more expensive than a large reactor. This is because they lose out on what are called economies of scale, and so the per-unit cost actually becomes larger as you go to smaller units.

We really don't know how the economies of scale will play out with SMRs. Some companies are building even smaller small modular reactors. We spoke to one man who's hoping to build a micro modular reactor on the site of a former coal power station in Wales.

My name is Michael Crabb. I'm the senior vice-president of the commercial team here at Last Energy. Last Energy is a micro nuclear technology developer. So a micro modular nuclear power plant is what we describe about our product. And what Last Energy has done is designed that power plant and that nuclear island, which has the nuclear reactor, to be mass manufacturable.

So our product is ultimately a 20MW power plant, versus SMRs, small modular reactors, tend to be 300MW or so. And then the traditional nuclear plants are 1,000MW and much, much larger, both in space and capability.

Each of our units is approximately $100mn. I think it's about £80mn. The key advantage, as I described, building smaller. There are quite a few institutional investors that can invest in something that's $100mn. And so that's a key value proposition of our product.

The prototype that we have here in Washington DC is not a working prototype. It is a full-scale build-up of the nuclear island. And so it has the pressure vessel. It has some of the pipes. There's no working pumps, but we have placeholders for those. For us, it was more of making sure that that execution around fabricating, assembling, managing subcontractors could be accomplished. The one I'll show you today is non-operating.

I wish all nuclear start-ups all the best, but I think we should be realistic here. We are talking about nuclear power that doesn't exist yet. It exists in PowerPoint, and in any PowerPoint presentations these nuclear reactors look wonderful. They're clean, and they're efficient, and they're cheap and easy to build.

We haven't seen these reactors in action. We're being a little bit naive if we believe the industry hype. If we had to choose, we should build these big, clunky, old-fashioned nuclear reactors that can power a society, rather than focus on building these small modular reactors that could provide electricity for the households in a small town or maybe one or two data centres. That choice should be obvious.

But the choice isn't obvious because, historically, so many nuclear power projects have gone well over time and over budget.

I think nuclear industry has a bad name because it has wasted so many taxpayer dollars over time, and no one has ever apologised for it. If you go $10bn over budget and 10 years over schedule, and you do it on the ratepayer or the taxpayer's dime, you can't turn around and celebrate that like a huge success. It's incredibly offensive to people who are working hard to make ends meet.

So are you basically saying that EDF, Westinghouse, these companies should actually have apologised?

I don't know if I can take that bait. What I will say is, I think the nuclear industry needs to deliver, and it is our responsibility. We need to stop blaming other people and stop blaming history and stop blaming all these other things and really take accountability for delivering.

I think the reason that tech companies are looking to nuclear power is because they have very significant electricity needs, and those needs are increasing as they try and serve more customers and build these great, big data centres. And nuclear power provides a stable source of low-carbon power.

So Microsoft is trying to reopen Three Mile Island. They've signed a deal with its owner to buy power from the reactor that closed. Amazon has agreed to pay about $650mn to put a data centre near a nuclear site in Pennsylvania. Google was among the first to step into this world by making an order for power from small modular reactors last year. And Facebook has also made moves into this area, but its plans came unstuck slightly due to a host of environmental and regulatory issues, including presence locally of beehives.

AI is a huge driver of all this. One AI query consumes 10 times as much energy as a standard Google search. The hyperscale data centres can require as much electricity per year as something like 400,000 electric cars. But we have recently seen these results published by DeepSeek, the Chinese company, which suggests AI could end up being more efficient and less energy-intensive than some people predict. So there is a degree of uncertainty hanging over all this.

There are many people that believe that we can go right the way through the energy transition with carbon capture and storage, with wind and solar, with battery systems, and with other forms of renewable energy. However, the economics do not dictate that as a viable pathway or answer. Energy storage costs are still sky-high at grid scale.

Economically, eventually, nuclear power will have to be the pathway. When we get to low-cost nuclear through SMRs and maybe other technologies, there will be no other viable way to run an economy. However, we don't have SMRs today, so investment in wind, in energy storage, in solar, and in carbon capture are reasonable today, as long as we have a transition plan.

But not everyone thinks that nuclear needs to be part of a green energy future. Dale Vince is the founder of Ecotricity, a UK power supplier that generates green energy.

There are so many reasons not to like nuclear power. In broad terms, it's too slow, and too expensive, and too dangerous. It can't help us with our carbon targets. If you're talking about a big nuclear power station, 10 years to plan, 10 years to build, and then another 10 years of operation to break even on a carbon basis. It's the most expensive electricity known to mankind. And the clean-up costs, we're only just guessing at.

It's not uncommon for people to say about me, oh, but you are a businessman in wind and sun. Therefore, you're going to be against fossil fuels or against nuclear power or something like that. But I am first and foremost an environmentalist, and I care about what happens in our country. I want us to be sustainable. I want us to power ourselves from a power source that will never run out and not cause pollution and which we can control the price of so that we can nail our energy bills to the floor. I am not interested in business. I am only in it to change the world.

Take a windmill, for example. We could build it from scratch. We could find a piece of land, say, that's suitable for a windmill, and we could build it within 12 months. Six months later it's broke even on a carbon footprint basis. All of the carbon used in its manufacture, transport, and installation is wiped out.

That's 30 years with a nuclear power station. 18 months or 30 years? We've got an abundance of wind and sun that will never run out, or there's uranium that we have to buy from a constrained global market. Whichever way you look at it, nuclear doesn't make sense. Economically, environmentally, it just doesn't make sense.

Dunkelflaute.

Dunkelflaute.

Dunkelflaute.

My German is a bit rustier than it should be.

Dunkelflaute is a German word. They like to chain words together. And really, it's describing when it's dark, and when there's low wind. It's a perfectly bad combination for renewable energy, for the wind and the sun, and we don't have what we need. Now, it doesn't actually happen that often. Solar is more active in the summer than the winter, and wind is vice versa. They're very complimentary technologies.

You have to have something available for when the wind doesn't blow, and the sun doesn't shine. And on the 22nd of January this year the wind didn't blow, and the sun didn't shine, so we were dependent for a mixture of gas at 70 per cent on the grid, and nuclear is about 15 per cent on the grid, a bit of biomass and some imports, mainly from France. That tells you that you need to plan for there not to be any wind and not to be any sun.

It's very rare for there to be no wind everywhere for very long at all. Remember that we're interconnected in Europe with grid connections from one country to another, and we regularly ship power to where it's needed from where we have more than we need. Wind moves in broad fronts across the continent. We can see it coming, and it's very rare for there to be more than a few hours or a day of low wind somewhere. But there will always be wind somewhere else.

We're at 50 per cent green on the grid in our country right now. There are six countries in the world that are almost at 100 per cent. This stuff works. And the smart grid actually is the answer to the Dunkelflaute question.

There are people that believe you can carry on building intermittent renewables, particularly wind. But we do have to think what happens when the wind doesn't blow. And we've had wind outages in the North Sea of up to two weeks. Admittedly, those are quite rare, but wind outages of up to a day are pretty common.

So how do you store all the energy we need for the time when the wind doesn't blow? Right now, in the UK, we have just over 30GW hours of storage, and that roughly means we can power the entire UK for about one hour on stored energy. Yes, that will increase over the coming while, but it's not going to increase by a factor of 10.

The UK is by no means the only country boosting energy storage as it races to reshape a power grid built for fossil fuels so it can use more renewable electricity. Nuclear power plants have traditionally been built to run more or less flat out, rather than continuously ramping up and down to fill in the gaps left when the wind doesn't blow, or the sun doesn't shine. That's why some critics think they won't quite play the role that the nuclear industry imagines.

This is a challenge, but all electricity grids have to deal with these kinds of challenges. All plants are going to be shut down during some period of the time. Nothing is completely reliable. And this is why grids involve diversity of different kinds of sources.

A nuclear plant, a coal plant, all of them have to be shut down either for refuelling, or for maintenance, or because some part breaks down. And the same thing can happen in the case of renewables, as well. And so this is why we plan on it by having diversity.

Maybe the real issue here isn't just about cost and construction time. It's actually the political acceptability of nuclear power. And in the minds of some voters, that often comes down to one thing, perception of risk.

Introducing nuclear power to the world in an atomic bomb was probably the worst PR stunt ever. This idea that a nuclear reactor may explode like a bomb is still around, even though the uranium inside a nuclear reactor is not nearly as enriched as it is in a bomb. A bomb is designed so all the energy will explode all at once, whereas in a nuclear power plant, the whole idea is that the energy inside the atoms is released very, very slowly. If you look at the atomic bomb as an outsized stick of dynamite, a nuclear power plant is just a mere stick of incense.

Imagine that you open up a newspaper, and you read about a discovery, a new energy source, using very little resources that's abundant and cheap. If you read that that new energy source produces zero carbon electricity without air pollution, of course, everybody will think, wow, this is brilliant. We need to get going with this energy source. Well, we have that source. It's called nuclear power.

When you want to deploy a nuclear reactor, it doesn't matter whether it's a small one or a larger one. It still has to go through an extensive licencing process. And that includes a lot of validation and verification of the technology to demonstrate that, when it operates it will be safe. Most of the waste from the UK's nuclear programme is stored at Sellafield in Cumbria, some at Dounreay in Scotland, and there are smaller amounts stored at the reactor sites.

But at the reactor sites, once the fuel is taken out, and that goes to Sellafield, then the challenges associated with decommissioning and waste deployment are much less. And for, say, 10 reactors to replace the existing fleet, that would only add around about 10 per cent to the volume of the waste that the UK has to deal with from history anyway. So the amount that you're adding is quite small in relation to the overall amount. And the overall amount isn't that big anyway.

But when you talk about high-level waste, this is the incredibly long-lasting radioactive material.

It's the spent fuel that comes out of the reactor and is then subsequently processed in order to extract the more radioactive elements, which are then contained in glass inside steel containers.

Just in terms of the toxicity of the material, is it right that if you just had a gramme of the most toxic nuclear waste, that could kill you?

It wouldn't necessarily, no. It would depend on whether you breathed it, whether you ingested it, and whether you were unlucky enough for a cancer to be caused as a result of having done that. So not necessarily is the answer to that.

We cannot rule out the possibility of an accident. One day there will be one, and we better be prepared. I think it's instructive to look at what happened in Fukushima in 2011. There were three meltdowns. And we know from two reports produced by the United Nations Scientific Committee on the effects of atomic radiation that there was no increase in cancer, there was no increase in heart disease, or there was no increase in birth defects, nor do the experts expect such an increase.

A team of experts from several universities concluded that this massive evacuation was a mistake. And I hope when a next nuclear accident occurs that the response of the government will not be the same as the response from the Japanese government. Chernobyl was a very, very different accident from a typical meltdown. Chernobyl wasn't even a meltdown. It was a blow up, if you will. A reactor exploded. People went to hospital with radiation burns.

This has not happened in Fukushima, for instance. We know that in Chernobyl the current death toll stands at a couple dozen people who were hospitalised soon after the events and whose treatment for acute radiation sickness failed. Other people have died because of the explosion which happened at the reactor in Chernobyl.

Authorities have concluded that around 30 people died as a result of the explosion itself. But the number affected by the fallout remains contested.

Three Mile Island cannot be called a nuclear disaster. It was an accident. There was a partial meltdown. The radiation released at Three Mile Island was equivalent to the radiation you would be exposed to if you go to the dentist and have a photo taken of your teeth. It looks like we've made nuclear power such a spectre for so long that we kind of assume that any accident happening at a nuclear power plant must be of apocalyptic proportions.

So in the case of Chernobyl, yes, there were only about 31 people who died immediately after. But because the primary impact we are concerned about is radioactive materials being spread and then causing radiation doses to people, which then takes many, many years before it manifests in the form of, let's say, cancer, or cardiac diseases, or other health impacts that have been widely studied by epidemiologists. And there are very clear correlations.

The impact of radiation is not deterministic, but what we call stochastic. In other words, if there are a hundred people who are exposed to the same dose, it's not like everybody is going to have the same impact. Some people will develop cancers. Others will not develop cancers. And so it's very hard to prove something. Things like cancer can develop due to other reasons. And so it's not possible to unambiguously show that a particular person's cancer is only because of their exposure to radiation, or it's not because they have smoked, or they've eaten something else.

It's not just the number of deaths that we should be worried about. For those people who are living near Chernobyl, for example, many of them live with the daily fear that they are going to be diagnosed with cancer at some point. And there's a lot of stress. There's a lot of uncertainty. There's a lot of people who have survived these cancers but at tremendous personal cost.

So, for example, many of the people who have developed thyroid cancer - and there were thousands of people who developed those thyroid cancers - they have to take drugs. They have to remove their thyroid. It's not a nice life. So you cannot just measure based on numbers of deaths.

The number of accidents is small, in part because the number of reactors are small. If we had built 10 times as many reactors, we probably would have had that many more accidents.

The UK and the US have got extremely strict regulatory regimes. We have independent regulators, and very strong controls are put in place to keep those regulators distant from the manufacturers and even parts of government that might have a vested interest. And for that reason, the western world has kept nuclear power safe. SMRs have to undergo the same safety tests as the big reactors. And nuclear is quite proud of its safety record in the west.

What is the promise of nuclear power?

Nuclear energy was one of the most precious sources of energy ever gifted to humankind because it is very energy-dense. It's low-carbon in a world where that is really important. And it can be made cost-effective.

Do you think that promise is going to be achieved?

Yes, I do. I think that promise will be achieved, and it will certainly be achieved in my lifetime and probably the viewer's lifetime.

Throughout human history, we have always lived with energy scarcity. We used to burn trees, and we used to dig for coal, and then suddenly came along nuclear power. This has huge potential. It was the first time that a clean, abundant energy source entered the field. It looks like we haven't gotten used to the idea that we finally found this abundant energy source. Energy is the basis of a modern society, and we will need lots, and lots, and lots more energy to spread global prosperity around the world.

What is the promise of nuclear power?

I love that. So the promise of nuclear power has always been, from day one, power so cheap that we won't even metre it. I would say all of the promises of nuclear power have been broken, smashed to pieces. They're lying on the floor. I don't understand how it has any credibility at all, the nuclear industry.

Yeah, it's interesting to notice the emotions that nuclear power sparks. And it's not just anxiety or anger, even, when you raise the topic of nuclear power. It's also the enthusiasm you get on the other side, where people would cheer if you start talking about nuclear power.

Nuclear power may be so divisive because it has such a huge potential. I sometimes even think that the people who oppose nuclear power understand that potential better than the people who are in favour of nuclear power.

Even a great advocate of nuclear won't say it can power the world by 2030. We've got a long journey to build up the supply chains. This is a major reindustrialisation, not just of the UK, but of the world, to get behind these still fairly complex systems called SMRs and make them in the quantity necessary to decarbonise. But we've got to do it.

If my views on nuclear power have changed at all in the last couple of decades, I would say it's probably to become more pragmatic, and rather than want us to close down what we have, it would be to see them see out their lifespan. Let them make a contribution, so by 2030, we still have nuclear on the system. It can play a role in the transition.

But I believe we should not be building new nuclear power stations because they make no economic, or environmental, or health and safety sense. We have nuclear power. It's playing an important role on the grid. It can continue to do that as we drive the grid to 100 per cent green. And we can allow nuclear to drop off the system over the next 10, 15 years.

I've been covering clean energy for well over a decade at the Financial Times. And in that time I can't remember another moment when pressure to build more nuclear power has been as high as it is now. That's partly because we've failed to contain carbon emissions and also because of an expectation that tech companies, the rise of AI means that there's going to be much greater demand for electricity overall.

But nuclear remains an incredibly contentious source of electricity. Some countries, including my own, Australia, currently make it illegal to build a nuclear power plant. That may change. It's unclear. But one thing is for sure. The pressure to build more nuclear power is now higher than it's been for many, many years.