The Anonymous Widower

Ministers Will Relax Rules To Build Small Nuclear Reactors

The title of this post is the same as that of this article in The Times.

This is the sub-heading.

Britain’s five nuclear power stations, which generate about 6GW in total, powering 13 million homes, are all nearing the end of their lives

These first three paragraphs indicate the reasons why, the government wants to relax the rules.

Ministers are preparing to relax planning rules to make it easier to build mini nuclear power plants in more parts of the country in order to hit green energy targets and boost the industry.

They are also examining whether it is possible to streamline the process for approving the safety of new nuclear power plants as a way to reduce construction delays.

At present rules state that only the government may designate sites for potential nuclear power stations, of which there are eight, severely limiting where they can be built.

The article includes a vote and surprisingly to me, the vote embedded in the article, shows 92 % in favour of relaxing the rules and only 8 % against.

I must admit these figures surprise me, as I’d have thought more would have been against.

Certain Words Frighten The Public

It is because nuclear is one of those words, that I felt that the vote in favour would have been much lower.

Regular readers of this blog will know, that in the 1960s,, I worked for ICI doing itinerant computing and instrumentation tasks, in my first job after leaving Liverpool University with a degree in Control Engineering.

I can now classify the experience as a superb apprenticeship, where I learned a lot that has been useful to me in later life.

For a time, I was working on nuclear magnefic resonance or NMR scans. ICI Mond Division in Runcorn had one of the best installations for analysing chemicals using this technique, which is described in this Wikipedia entry, which starts with these sentences.

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is a physical phenomenon in which nuclei in a strong constant magnetic field are disturbed by a weak oscillating magnetic field (in the near field) and respond by producing an electromagnetic signal with a frequency characteristic of the magnetic field at the nucleus. This process occurs near resonance, when the oscillation frequency matches the intrinsic frequency of the nuclei, which depends on the strength of the static magnetic field, the chemical environment, and the magnetic properties of the isotope involved; in practical applications with static magnetic fields up to ca. 20 tesla, the frequency is similar to VHF and UHF television broadcasts (60–1000 MHz).

One day, the Senior Scientist, who ran the machine came in to work and announced that the property of nuclear magnetic resonance would be replacing X-rays, as the technology had just been used to give a three-dimensional image of something like the tail of a mouse.

Now fifty-five years later, many if not most of us have had MRi scans.

The Wikipedia entry for Magnetic Resonance Imaging or MRi, explains, what happened to the dreaded N-word.

MRI was originally called NMRI (nuclear magnetic resonance imaging), but “nuclear” was dropped to avoid negative associations.

Perhaps, it would be easier to build nuclear power stations, if the level of science teaching in the UK was better.

The Three Paragraphs In Detail

Earlier, I copied three paragraphs from The Times, into this post.

I shall now look at each in detail.

Paragraph 1

Ministers are preparing to relax planning rules to make it easier to build mini nuclear power plants in more parts of the country in order to hit green energy targets and boost the industry.

I was in Suffolk, when the planning of Sizewell B was undertaken.

There appeared to be little strong opposition, but the general feeling was what there was from second home owners, who were worried that the value of their holiday home would decline.

Employment and commerce created by Sizewell B was certainly good for the area in lots of ways.

At the time, my late wife; C was practicing as a family barrister in chambers in Ipswich. She believed that the building of Sizewell B had had a good effect on the area, as it had injected work and money, which had created the finance to allow a couple to end a marriage, that had long since died. She stated a couple of times, that Sizewell B was good for her practice.

Paragraph 2

They are also examining whether it is possible to streamline the process for approving the safety of new nuclear power plants as a way to reduce construction delays.

My worry about streamlining the process for approving safety, is that we approve nuclear power stations so rarely, do we have the qualified personnel to replace elapsed time with people. I would suggest that we don’t.

But we could have.

• We have some excellent universities, where Nuclear Engineering can be studied.
• How many personnel leave the Royal Navy each year, who could be trained as nuclear safety inspectors?
• If say Rolls-Royce and/or Hitachi are building several small modular nuclear reactors a year in the UK, then nuclear engineering will become fashionable,  as electronics was for my generation of engineers and it will attract the brightest students.

Perhaps an established university, with access to the needed skills should be funded to set up a Nuclear Safety Institute

Paragraph 3

At present rules state that only the government may designate sites for potential nuclear power stations, of which there are eight, severely limiting where they can be built.

I can envisage new small modular nuclear reactors being built in the UK, where there is a need for lots of electricity to support developments like.

• Offshore wind farms
• Data centres
• Green steelmaking
• Metal refining
• Hydrogen production.

Rolls-Royce have said that their small reactors will be around 470 MW, so I could imagine power stations of this size being placed on disused coal-fired power station sites to boost power in an area. I have already suggested building some on Drax in The Future Of Drax Power Station.

In some locations, the choice could be between a small modular nuclear reactor and some form of energy storage.

Powering Germany

But there is one controversial area, where we can take advantage.

• The Germans are very short of electricity because of their reliance on coal and Russian gas that needs to be replaced.
• The 1.4 GW NeuConnect interconnector is being built by European and Japanese money between the Isle of Grain and Wilhelmshaven.
• The AquaVentus hydrogen system could be extended to Humberside to link with UK hydrogen production and storage.
• A couple of small modular nuclear reactors could be built on Humberside  to back up hydrogen production, when the wind isn’t blowing.

But Rolls-Royce and other companies have been putting small nuclear reactors close to the sea bed safely for decades, so why no design an offshore reactor that can be placed at a safe distance offshore?

We would need to solve the Putin and friends problem first, but I can see the UK exporting a lot of electricity and hydrogen produced by nuclear energy.

February 6, 2025 Posted by AnonW | Energy, Hydrogen | Apprenticeship, AquaVentus, Drax Power Station, Germany, ICI, Liverpool University, NeuConnect, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, Nuclear Power, Rolls-Royce, Small Modular Nuclear Reactor, Vladimir Putin | Leave a comment