Long time nuclear reactor designer Rolls-Royce has announced the creation of the Rolls-Royce Small Modular Reactor (SMR) following a £195m cash injection from private firms and a £210m grant from the UK government. It is hoped the new company will create up to 40,000 jobs by 2050.
According to Rolls-Royce, the SMR unit will bring forward and deliver at scale the next generation of low cost, low carbon nuclear power technology.
Rolls-Royce Group, BNF Resources UK Limited and Exelon Generation Limited will invest £195m across a period of around three years. The funding will enable the business to secure grant funding of £210 million from UK Research and Innovation funding, first announced by the UK Prime Minister in ‘The Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution’. Today’s announcement is another step towards the delivery of the Government’s net zero strategy and its 10-point plan.
Rolls-Royce is not the first firm with plans to create mini nuclear reactors. In October, Engineering Matters announced how former engineers of SpaceX have created a new company, Radiant, which will design and create mini reactors as well.
Warren East, Rolls-Royce CEO, said: “The SMR programme is one of the ways that Rolls-Royce is meeting the need to ensure the UK continues to develop innovative ways to tackle the global threat of climate change. With the Rolls-Royce SMR technology, we have developed a clean energy solution which can deliver cost competitive and scalable net zero power for multiple applications from grid and industrial electricity production to hydrogen and synthetic fuel manufacturing.”
Nine-tenths of an individual Rolls-Royce SMR power plant will be built or assembled in factory conditions and around 80 percent could be delivered by a UK supply chain – a unique offering in energy infrastructure in the UK. Much of the venture’s investment is expected to be focused in the North of the UK, where there is significant existing nuclear expertise.
A single Rolls-Royce SMR power station will occupy the footprint of two football pitches – 1/10 the size of a regular nuclear power plant – and power approximately one million homes, generating 470mw of low carbon energy, equivalent to more than 150 onshore wind turbines.
It can support both on-grid electricity and a range of off-grid clean energy solutions, enabling the decarbonisation of industrial processes and the production of clean fuels, such as sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) and green hydrogen, to support the energy transition in the wider heat and transportation sectors.
Rolls-Royce has been a nuclear reactor plant designer since the start of the UK nuclear submarine programme in the 1950s. Its SMR programme will draw upon standard nuclear energy technology that has been used in 400 reactors around the world.
