Government plans to drastically scale up nuclear capacity are “ambiguous” leaving doubts that they are more of a “wish list” than a strategy to achieve those ambitions, according to a committee.
Parliamentarians on the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee said questions remain for ministers’ nuclear goals, with doubts over whether the government has a specific strategy to meet the target of increasing the UK’s nuclear capacity by 2050.
Highest Level of Nuclear Generation
Conservative Party MP Greg Clark, chair of the committee, said: “The government is right to identify nuclear power as an important contributor to meeting our future electricity needs. It has stretching ambitions to achieve 24GW of nuclear power by 2050.“This would be almost double the highest level of nuclear generation that the UK has ever attained.
“The only way to achieve this is to translate these very high-level aspirations into a comprehensive, concrete and detailed nuclear strategic plan which is developed jointly with the nuclear industry, which enjoys long-term cross-party political commitment and which therefore offers dependability for private and public investment decisions.”
“A Nuclear Strategic Plan must go beyond high-level aspirations: it must be a specific plan bringing together many particular decisions to be taken according to a clear timeframe upon which others can rely,” the report said.
Great British Nuclear
The committee questioned the purpose of Great British Nuclear (GBN), an arm’s-length body currently involved in the government-backed competition to develop smaller-scale nuclear technology projects.Mr. Shapps said that it will “drive rapid expansion of nuclear power at an unprecedented scale and pace.”
But the report said that “there is still ambiguity over what GBN’s exact remit will be in the future, beyond running a SMR [small modular reactor] competition.
“We recommend that the government should set out a more comprehensive statement of GBN’s remit, operational model and budget, and its intended role with respect to ministers and government departments.”
The committee recommended that if it is possible, the lives of some of the existing fleet of nuclear reactors “could be safely extended.”
It said that the case for gigawatt scale nuclear made by the government in its Energy Security Strategy is partly about attaining “net zero and partly about increasing the security of our domestic energy security supplied.”
However, it added that the security contribution has to take into account the question of fuel supply.
“It is also the case that the concentration of power generation in a small number of very large facilities means that were there any future malign activity by a hostile actor to target one or more of these plants, the impact on our resilience would be concomitantly greater than a more distributed system of smaller capacity generators, whether nuclear, renewables, or fossil fuel,” the report said.
In 2019, the UK passed laws requiring the country to bring all greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, as as required by the Climate Change Act 2008.
Earlier this year, a 2010 video of the former UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg resurfaced in which he dismissed the possibility of increasing the supply of nuclear energy on the grounds that the effects would not be felt until 2022.
A Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesperson said: “We have already made clear we will publish a nuclear roadmap and consult on alternative routes to market by the end of the year.
“Nuclear has a vital role to play in reaching net zero and boosting energy security—just last week we launched Great British Nuclear which will help generate billions for the UK economy and support thousands of jobs.”
