Looking forward: How nuclear will help the UK become energy and defence independent

The UK is working to increase nuclear power generation capacity to 24GW by 2050. At four times current rates, this will be the biggest expansion in 70 years. This growth includes current, large-scale new-build nuclear power plants and the next generation of small modular reactors, which are in the planning stage. In support of these, the government is also investing almost £300 million in UK production of the fuel known as HALEU, which is needed to power new high-tech nuclear reactors. In addition, the government’s recent modern Industrial Strategy named defence as one of the eight priority sectors for economic growth, and nuclear defence will play a major role.

How will the UK meet this growth and innovation challenge? In this month’s Thought Leadership interview, we hear from Nick Chown, Business Development Manager with Actemium Design Chorley. Backed by 25 years of experience working with supply chain engineering companies in both the Civil Nuclear and Nuclear Defence sectors, Nick shares his thoughts on the state of the nuclear sector and the innovations expected to help it achieve this rapid anticipated growth.

There’s a lot in the media about the nuclear industry at the moment. How would you sum up the current state of the nuclear energy and defence sectors?

Nick Chown: The industry is very buoyant. A lot is going on, primarily across three areas.

The first area involves nuclear decommissioning. The government’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) is dealing with the huge and pressing nuclear legacy that’s built up since the advent of the nuclear sector in the 1950s; leaving radioactive materials in on-site storage facilities is not a viable long-term solution. These materials are being retrieved using remote-handling techniques and will be consigned to long-term waste drums for ultimate disposal in a planned geological disposal facility.

Forming the NDA has helped accelerate decommissioning; a wide range of long-term framework contracts have been established for each site, covering the array of products and services required. These contracts have allowed the NDA to place contracts faster and therefore progress more quickly.

Nuclear new build is the second area. It’s being driven by the need to get the UK to net zero by 2050. So, unless we want to turn the lights off, we need a workable solution. We need a baseload of power, which you can’t get by burning fossil fuels if you’re also trying to meet the CO₂ target.

We also need to be energy independent. In the 1990s, nuclear power provided about 25% of the UK’s electricity; it’s currently providing only 12% and we import an equivalent percentage. In France, 70% of their power comes from nuclear, which is the highest percentage globally. Therefore, the government investment in new nuclear power in the UK is understandably huge.

The third part involves nuclear defence, which refers to anything that supports the UK’s CASD (Continuous At Sea Deterrent). This involves submarines and their maintenance, the reactors that power them, and the nuclear weapons carried by them. Defence spending and the need for defence independence is being driven by world events, including the Russia/Ukraine conflict and recent US political views.

What innovations do you think will be critical to achieving what the UK needs?

Nick: We’re seeing a lot of investment in small modular reactors (SMRs). SMRs are based on the same technology as their larger gigawatt (GW) cousins, but only generate a fraction of the power (typically  0.3GW). They can be built much faster and more economically, which makes the technology more attractive to investors. SMRs generate enough power — and potentially heat — for entire cities. They offer an alternative to running diesel generators (which produce a huge amount of CO₂) in remote communities, for example. Their primary advantage is that they can be placed near to where they’re needed.

SMRs will need specialist fuel: high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU). The only place you can buy HALEU currently is Russia. So, the UK government is investing heavily in this area.

Another new fuel source is accident-tolerant fuel (ATF), which involves coated fuel particles that can withstand extreme temperatures and prevent fuel failure and radioactive material release. Together with huge advancements in nuclear safety overall, ATF presents yet another evolution in reactor safety.

Fusion (versus the current fission reactor technology) represents energy nirvana. It enables the extraction of much more energy from nuclear fuel, doesn’t generate CO₂, and produces low levels of radioactive waste. However, its commercial deployment is still a long way off; despite huge international investment in the technology, it remains in the development phase where it’s still using more power than it’s generating. However, by 2035 the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) being built in the South of France is scheduled to operate at 500MW for short bursts of approximately 5 minutes. The reactor — still very much at the experimental stage — is expected to have an energy gain of approximately 10-fold (500MW output for 50MW input). However, it won’t produce any electricity. So, as I mentioned, it’s still a long way off from being a viable solution for our energy needs.

Most of the public used to be anti-nuclear power. What do you think is changing their opinion so dramatically?

Nick: Yes, people are far more accepting of the use of nuclear power as a solution to our energy needs today. This is being helped along by the fact that nuclear power doesn’t generate any CO₂ and because people understand that today’s nuclear reactors are much safer than they used to be. There’s a greater use of “passive safety”, which relies on the laws of physics (for example, the expansion and contraction of fluids with changes in temperature, gravity, and convection). Chernobyl, on the other hand, relied on operator intervention to control the process to ensure the reactor didn’t go out of control — and without operator intervention, it would go out of control. But a modern pressurised water reactor (PWR) fails to safety — it shuts down if left.

Several notable nuclear accidents over the years resulted in regulatory bodies being formed. These bodies ensure the industry has an increased level of oversight, where workers are encouraged to ask questions and intervene without fear of job loss. This wasn’t the case before; often industry leaders couldn’t be questioned.

Could anything disrupt these sectors from achieving what’s needed?

Nick: Two major impeding factors are the depleting pool of suppliers and the attrition caused by an ageing workforce. The most recent nuclear power station built in Britain is Sizewell-B, which began construction in 1987 and began operating in 1995. Nothing new has been built since. When the people who understand how to run existing operating power stations start retiring, we lose decades of knowledge about nuclear safety, decommissioning, refuelling, etc. You can’t simply replace them with someone without any experience.

The understanding is that we must decommission now while we still have people with the needed knowledge. However, a huge amount of information is archived within the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. Having this more readily available and interpreted by AI, for example, may offer some help in retrieving what’s needed for specific future instances.

Without any nuclear new build activity for decades, the supply chain needed to support it has been depleted. Supply chains react to demand, which hasn’t been there for many years. In addition, the nuclear industry is hugely regulated, which, while bringing much-needed rigour to procurement, has made it difficult for new entrants to enter the market — particularly small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) which need to build the credentials required to bid on projects. A concerted effort has been made to bring non-nuclear companies up to speed when it comes to supplying the sector, both in terms of helping them navigate the public procurement process and setting up training to develop the nuclear skills we’ll need in the future.

The huge investment in time and money needed to build a nuclear power station is also a barrier. However, SMRs will help mitigate this. While they do produce significantly less power, they require much lower investment, can be operational in about four years instead of the 13 required for a large power station, take up a tiny percentage of the footprint of a conventional GW power station, and can be built closer to where power is needed.

How has Actemium evolved its focus to keep pace with the changing nuclear industry?

Nick: We’ve been supporting the nuclear industry for almost 40 years. We began as North West Projects focusing on control, electrical and instrumentation for the Sellafield nuclear site in West Cumbria and became part of VINCI Energies in 2017. We then diversified away from our focus on Sellafield to a wider overview of the nuclear market.

We’re now a balance of different engineering areas of expertise, with a firm focus on engineering design, whilst increasingly coordinating with the wider supply chain needed for a turnkey solution. Within nuclear, it’s common for companies to collaborate to support specific opportunities, and we welcome the opportunity to work with others. We’re also working with our sister companies within Actemium wherever possible and when their expertise aligns with our client’s needs.

I strongly believe that collaboration will be key to ensuring the nuclear industry can make the advancements essential to meet the UK’s future needs. It’s exciting to be a trusted partner at the forefront of this change.