- Polish billionaire Michał Sołowow’s SGE announces £35bn plan to build 14 GE Vernova Hitachi BWRX-300 reactors at three UK sites
- The project aims to provide 4.2 GW of electricity from 2034, efficiently powering 8 million homes for more than 60 years.
- The project is seeking government support, with guaranteed prices intended to be set for the power producer before being offered to investors.
Small modular nuclear reactors appear to be back in vogue globally, and a consortium of investors is now seeking to bring the technology back to the UK as part of an effort to both meet environmental targets and increase energy security in an increasingly unstable world.
Polish company SGE (Synthos Green Energy) plans to build up to 14 reactors across three sites in the UK, including six at its main site and four each at its two secondary sites.
With an estimated construction cost of £35 billion ($46.5 billion), the project, if approved, is expected to be one of the largest SMR projects the UK government commits to under its Advanced Nuclear Framework, unveiled earlier this year, to support the development of privately funded projects.
A sign of things to come?
Unlike more monolithic nuclear reactor designs, small modular reactors (SMRs) not only have a lower energy footprint, but also a smaller overall site footprint than older, larger reactors.
The first site disclosed for SME’s project, Oldbury, South Gloucestershire, is a former Magnox nuclear power station which generated up to 434MW of electricity and is now expected to house up to six 300W SMRs, according to SGE’s plans.
Although the other two sites are not yet publicly named, they are expected to be split into 4+4 reactors, bringing the total to 14 reactors.
Part of the reason the UK government is interested in outsourcing power generation, even nuclear, to private equity is that it expects power demand from AI data centers to increase over the coming years, even as the country’s overall energy needs increase.
This is also the reason why Google Cloud, a key player in AI data centers, joined the SME project as a strategic partner which could, according to Michał Sołowow, invest up to £4.5 billion in the country’s data centers to use some of the additional capacity.
Given that SMRs (including the GE Vernova Hitachi BWRX-300 project) and data centers require access to water and space for construction, it can be assumed that both will prefer cheap and easily accessible coastal, estuarine or riverine land, meaning that the UK countryside could soon see some areas change significantly in terms of aesthetics, at the very least.
Smaller rivers, however, might not be enough, as SMRs also require the bodies of water they use to act as “heat sinks” for their operation, and 6 or 4 in the same location could overwhelm them, limiting the number of viable areas for such builds, meaning the proposed SME project could lay the basis for how privatized nuclear power will shape the British countryside in the days to come, even as demand for data centers of AI is expected to increase pressure on the national network.
As yet, SME’s proposal has not yet been approved by the government, making the £35 billion figure an estimate that may or may not apply, given that it still needs to secure funding and secure government price guarantees before moving significantly towards construction.
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