Kick Nuclear, July 2026

KICK NUCLEAR

SMR PLANS

As we have pointed out previously, no new nuclear power stations have gone into operation in the UK in the last 31 years. This in spite of ambitious schemes for a quite large number of new massive nuclear power stations being frequently announced.

All this hype has in fact just produced just two nuclear power stations, currently being built – Hinkley Point C in Somerset that started building in 2016 and Sizewell C in Suffolk which started building in January 2024. Both are helping make the case against such stations by taking much longer to build, at least in Hinkley’s case, and costing vastly more to build than first estimated.

Hinkley C was originally to be operational by 2024, but is now not expected to be operational till at least 2030 and its estimated cost of building it has risen from £18bn to between £35bn to £48bn, as estimated by the National Audit Office. It was originally estimated Sizewell C would take between nine and 12 years to become operational, but it will probably take longer. The cost of building it was estimated by EDF in 2020 as £20bn; in July 2025 the official estimate was raised to £38bn.

Not surprisingly, given this long history of expensive failures to fulfil plans for a UK “nuclear renaissance” based on large nuclear power stations. the government seems to have gone cold on such plans. Certainly no further large nuclear power stations are currently planned.

Now the nuclear future is seen instead in terms of “small modulated reactors” (SMRs), which it is claimed will be cheaper, quicker to build and safer than the old sort, though this is yet to be shown as none have so far been built in this country and there are currently only two SMRs in operation anywhere in the world, in Russia and China, with one in construction in Argentina.

It was announced by the Government’s Great British Energy – Nuclear (GB-E) on April 13 that it had signed a contract with Rolls-Royce SMRto start technology design activities that will enable the delivery of these SMRs as part of what it calls the Government’s “clean energy mission”. It is it’s planned that three RR 470 MWe SMRs will be built at Wylfa in Anglesea site (originally designated for a large EDF European Pressurised Nuclear Reactor power station) starting this year, and planned to provide electricity by the mid-2030s. Up to another five such SMRs at the site are also contemplated.

In July a consortium led by the billionaire industrialist Michał Sołowow announced plans to build 14 small modular nuclear reactors on three sites across the UK, including at the site of a former nuclear plant at Oldbury in Gloucestershire. The Polish entrepreneur plans to use £35bn of private capital to roll out enough SMRs to power the equivalent of 8m UK homes for more than 60 years, or even power data centre investments alongside Google. Sołowow’s nuclear development company, Synthos Green Enery (SGE), plans to make the “significant investment” of between £2.2bn to £2.5bn in each 300 megawatt reactor alongside a string of industrial partners including the US manufacturer GE Vernova and Japanese industrial conglomerate Hitachi, which are responsible for the design.

The consortium hopes to secure three sites for the boiling water reactors by July next year as well as a government support contract which would guarantee a “competitive” price for its electricity once it starts generating in 2034. It has not disclosed which sites it hopes to use for the GE Vernova Hitachi BWRX-300 design, or which energy company would be the operator. However, it us understood the consortium has submitted an application to use the Oldbury site in south Gloucestershire, also previously intended for the site of an EDF EPR nuclear power station.

“THE WASTE REMAINS…”

William Empson (1937)

World Nuclear News reported on 22/6/26 that, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) “The global total of used nuclear fuel produced by nuclear power plants is about 448,000 tonnes of heavy metal, with three-quarters in storage and one-quarter reprocessed [to be used in other nuclear reactors]” The IAEA has also produced an inventory of how much such waste is stored country by country.

This is highly-radioactive nuclear waste and though a small proportion of nuclear waste generally, contains a large part of the radioactivity present in such waste. In the UK’s case the IAEA reports that it has 4.58 million cubic metres of nuclear waste of which only 1,670 cubic meters are high-level waste (Less than 0.1% of the total),. However the high-level waste is responsible for 95% of the overall radioactivity of the waste!

The problem with the high-level waste of which more is being produced all the time as nuclear power stations continue to operate, is that it continues to emit deadly radiation for thousands of years before losing most of its radioactivity, so it needs to be safely stored for such a long period of time. The only solution that seems to have been seriously considered is deep storage underground and hope for the best. This has the advantage that, at least in the short term, the radiation emitted by the waste is absorbed in any containment vessel and, failing that, the earth around.

However, deep storage makes it very difficult to monitor the waste and what is happening to it over the thousands of years it needs to be stored for, while and earth movements may well breach any containment vessel and even force the waste back up to the surface. So this solution for dealing with the waste today may well mean a much more difficult problems for our descendants.

So far only one such deep depository has been built – in Finland, though some other countries, including the UK, are proposing to build ones.

DEADLY FOR MARINE LIFE TOO

Environmentalists in the UK have shown great concern about the great damage that Hinkley Point C is liable to cause to marine life in the Severn Estuary through sucking in tons of fish and other marine life with the enormous amount of water it will need to suck in continuously to keep its two reactors cool when in operation. Hence the mad scheme by EDF to have loud music continually played at the entry point for cooling water to the plant entering from the estuary which is supposed to keep marine life at bay. Though I’m not clear marine life being sucked into the reactors will have time to react to the music positively or negatively

This is not only a problem with UK reactors. On 20th June Le Monde reported that research by the network Sortir du Nucléaire, had found that each year nearly 6 billion fish, crustaceans, and jellyfish fall victim to French nuclear power plants, which mostly draw their cooling water from rivers. SdN said its findings were based on internal EDF documents.

ZAPORIZHZHIA HIT AGAIN

In the previous two of these newsletters I reported on nuclear reactors in war zones being damaged by by military action. It was reported on June 20 that Zaporizhzhia power station had experienced another blackout that day, the 20th since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The ministry stated that the plant lost power supply but emergency diesel generators automatically kicked-in to provide backup electricity for cooling reactor core and to maintainother critical nuclear safety functions at the facility. If the diesel generators had failed of course, like they did at Fukushima, there would have been a major disaster.