Britain’s nuclear revival is welcome – but long overdue

11 June 2025, 12:40

By Dr Mann Virdee

Yesterday was a good day for nuclear power.

The government announced it’s committing £14.2 billion to the building of the Sizewell C nuclear power station. It’s also allocating £2.5 billion for a small modular reactor (SMR) programme. That comes alongside the news that Rolls-Royce SMR has won the Great British Nuclear competition to build the first SMRs in the UK.

There’s no doubt this is a step forward and is to be welcomed. Countries around the world are grappling with the ‘energy trilemma’ – balancing energy security, affordability, and sustainability. Nuclear energy is vital to tackling this challenge.

But this decision is also long overdue. As I highlighted in a recent paper on the Clean Power 2030 target, the Czech power company CEZ was ahead of Britain in signing a deal with Rolls-Royce SMR, a UK company, to form a strategic partnership to develop and deploy SMRs.

Rolls-Royce were widely viewed as the frontrunner in this process to build the UK’s SMRs, and there was little doubt they would become the ‘preferred bidder’. So why did the selection process take two years?

In recent decades, the UK has developed a reputation for dithering on nuclear power. If we go back to the middle of the last century, the UK was actually the world leader in nuclear power. Between 1956 and 1966, Britain built 10 nuclear reactors – meaning the UK had more nuclear reactors than the rest of the world combined. But engineering expertise has since been lost as the nuclear industry atrophied – in part through reliance on gas.

More recently, in 2010, Nick Clegg – then Leader of the Liberal Democrats and soon-to-be Deputy Prime Minister – dismissed the possibility of increasing the supply of nuclear energy. His reasoning, apparently, was it would have no effect until 2022. Now, in 2025, we can see how short-sighted that was.

Now Britain has ambitious targets to decarbonise the electricity system, it is increasingly using solar and wind energy. The cost of such renewable energy technologies has recently plummeted, and – with the help of schemes such as Contracts for Difference – they have become competitive with traditional fossil fuels.

But there are some challenges. Solar and wind are intermittent, and they do not provide inertia – which is critical for the stability of the electricity system. Added to this, Beijing has a stranglehold over the solar industry, as well as minerals, such as those needed for wind turbines. Unless countries such as the UK develop alternative supply chains and manufacturing capabilities, an increasing reliance on these technologies for energy will also provide other countries with economic advantages and leverage.

So the announcement of funding for nuclear and the prospect of SMRs is exciting. But the UK needs to work much faster to streamline regulatory barriers and reform planning regulation to help these projects get off the ground quicker.

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Dr Mann Virdee is Senior Research Fellow (Science, Technology, and Economics) at the Council on Geostrategy.

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