Rolls-Royce rip-off

Rolls-Royce, perhaps best known for its luxury cars has a new unaffordable project in the works — small modular reactors (SMR).

The company  has entered the commercial nuclear reactor market, proposing its own SMR design — which, at 470 megawatts, isn’t actually very small at all. Many of Britain’s old Magnox reactors, now all permanently closed, were smaller than that. Two of the largest, at Wylfa in Anglesey on the North Wales coast, were each 490 megawatts.

Ironically, it is to Wylfa that Rolls-Royce is looking to site its first not so small modular reactors. It is planning for three there — with the capacity to extend to eight — and even won a competition conducted by Great British Energy-Nuclear to become the preferred bidder to place SMRs at the Wylfa site, purchased by the government from Hitachi in March 2024 after the Japanese company ditched plans to build two full-size reactors there.

The prize for Rolls-Royce’s winning bid was £2.5 billion in public funding (i.e. taxpayer money) toward the cost of the first three SMRs, not such good news for people who can’t afford to drive Rolls-Royces.

Another £25 million is to be shelled out to two engineering consultancies, WSP and Mott MacDonald, who will advise on environmental assessments, permitting and regulatory compliance.

The UK government claims nuclear power is “clean, secure, homegrown energy,” but in reality it is none of these. The reactors aren’t small and rely on uranium mined overseas — some of the fuel needed for the TerraPower reactors also targeted for the UK is only made in Russia — and will produce waste not work. 

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(Photo:Rex Gray/Creative Commons)