Are small modular reactors the answer nuclear power needs?

The traditional pressurised water reactor is an expensive and time-consuming build, so could smaller modular reactors provide us with a cheaper, quicker solution, asks Steven Cutts

Rolls Royce’s SMR division provides room for optimism in Britain (Rolls Royce)

In the early days of the post-Second World War world, nuclear power was regarded as the future and all modern governments fought to get a grip on this new and exciting technology. It was said that nuclear electricity would be too cheap to meter and that pollution as we knew it would become a thing of the past. Britain, the country that had arguably invented nuclear power, was at the forefront of this crusade.

We should remember also that it was a field that at times was capable of real triumphs. By 1996, about 17 per cent of the world’s electricity was derived from nuclear power. It’s an impressive figure and shows just how far our nuclear engineers had come. Then things started to go wrong. By 2019 the nuclear contribution to global power output had fallen to 10 per cent. Older reactors were in the process of being decommissioned and very few new ones were being built.

Worse than that, the cost of nuclear power is actually going up. In contrast, the cost of renewables is falling rapidly leading to a widespread take up for the new tech.