A Great British Nuke-Off in Wales?

25 March 2026, https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/great-british-nuke-wales

Quintessentially British Rolls-Royce wants to put its small new reactors on Anglesey, but it turns out they’re not so small or even particularly British, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER

THERE is something about Rolls-Royce that is quintessentially British. Not necessarily in a good way. The name tends to bring to mind tweedy toffs or rock stars with more money than sense, driving too fast in shiny and extravagantly baubled motor cars.

It’s the cars that made the Rolls-Royce name synonymous with luxury and class, specifically upper-class. It’s even entered the lexicon. Something can be called “the Rolls-Royce of….;” fill in the blank.

Of course, Rolls-Royce is now much bigger than just a car manufacturer. Frequent fliers will have spotted the company logo on many a jet engine.

Less well known is that Rolls-Royce makes the reactors for nuclear submarines, specifically the British Trident nuclear fleet. The company is set to produce a new propulsion reactor, PWR3, for the Dreadnought-class ballistic deterrent submarine, expected to be operational in the early 2030s, and whose missiles are capable of destroying all life on Earth multiple times over.

More recently, Rolls-Royce has entered the commercial nuclear reactor market, proposing its own small modular reactor (SMR) design — which, at 470 megawatts, isn’t actually very small at all. Many of Britain’s old Magnox reactors, now all permanently closed, were smaller than that. Two of the largest, at Wylfa in Anglesey, were each 490 megawatts.

Ironically, it is to Wylfa that Rolls-Royce is looking to site its first not so small modular reactors. It is planning for three there — with the capacity to extend to eight — and even won a competition conducted by Great British Energy-Nuclear to become the preferred bidder to place SMRs at the Wylfa site, purchased by the government from Hitachi in March 2024 after the Japanese company ditched plans to build two full-size reactors there.

The prize for Rolls-Royce’s winning bid was £2.5 billion in public funding (ie taxpayer money) toward the cost of the first three SMRs, not such good news for people who can’t afford to drive Rolls-Royces.

Another £25 million is to be shelled out to two engineering consultancies, WSP and Mott MacDonald, who will advise on environmental assessments, permitting and regulatory compliance.

As Linda Clare Rogers, co-deputy leader of the Welsh Green Party, asked in a letter to her Anglesey MP Llinos Medi of Plaid Cymru: “Why does Rolls-Royce need £25m of our money to spend on advisers and engineers to help it meet environmental and legal requirements, if they are confident what they’re doing is serviceable? As this is public money, will we have a say in proceedings? If not, why not? Other public services involve public engagement.”

That £25m just happens to be equal to the price tag for the Rolls-Royce La Rose Noire Droptail luxury car, unveiled in August 2023. So why not just sell one of those to pay for the advisers and engineers instead of fleecing British taxpayers?

Appropriately, the multi-billion pound Rolls-Royce triumph (to mix motoring metaphors), was lauded by a lord — it is unknown if he was wearing tweeds for the occasion — during a debate last July in the House of Lords.

Reading the transcript of what takes place in that neo-gothic edifice makes you wonder if you have time-travelled back a few centuries. Everyone is addressed as “my lords” even though there are ladies, too, and “my noble friend” and phrases such as “I thank the noble Earl for that question,” and “I thank the noble Viscount.”

It was Labour peer Lord Wilson of Sedgefield — real name Philip — who was beating the drum most loudly for nuclear power in general and Rolls-Royce in particular during that July debate.

This same “noble lord,” as we must perforce address him according to tradition, was also one of the “Famous Five” who helped Tony Blair get selected as a Labour candidate. Later, before he ascended to “The Lord Wilson,” he became an enthusiastic Jeremy Corbyn backstabber when Corbyn was Labour Party leader. So not really all that “noble.”

The lone voice of reason during the Lords nuclear debate came not from a “lord” but a woman, the Green Party’s Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb who said: “My lords, the minister said that everybody around the House supports nuclear. No, the Green Party does not support nuclear. It is a dinosaur technology and it is really very expensive, when you look at the planetary impact and the cost to the Exchequer. It is going to be a disaster and it will be overtaken by sea-level rises as well. Why do the government not take some good advice on this instead of believing in nuclear all the time?”

The good Lord Wilson quickly and condescendingly dismissed her ideas as “a bit on the fringe,” then repeatedly referred to new nuclear in Britain as “clean, secure, homegrown energy.”

But just as it is obvious that nuclear power is neither clean nor secure, whether great and British or not, it is most certainly not “homegrown” either, given that no uranium, the raw material needed to fuel reactors, is mined in the UK.

And, as it turns out, even Rolls-Royce isn’t quite so very British after all.

Rolls-Royce SMR (Small Modular Reactors), the company’s subsidiary focused on future nuclear energy, is not solely owned by the parent group. It has investors including the Qatar Investment Authority, BNF Resources (connected to the French Perrodo family that owns European oil and gas company Perenco), Constellation (a US energy company and part of Exelon), and CEZ, a Czech company.

Of course, even the Rolls-Royce car division isn’t actually British. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Germany’s BMW.

In addition to the Perrod family’s investments in oil and gas companies, Constellation owns oil and gas plants in the US. And while the Qatar Investment Authority has said it will not finance new fossil fuel projects, it has not divested from all of its existing oil and gas interests. CEZ continues to maintain coal plants and is supporting natural gas infrastructure.

This is a quiet reminder about the level of greenwashing that seeks to paint nuclear power as environmentally friendly when many of the companies involved in nuclear power are also still heavily invested in fossil fuels.

The partner Rolls-Royce has chosen to oversee delivery of the Wylfa reactors is the US-based engineering firm Amentum, which has around 6,000 staff in the UK. The small modular reactor is an old concept that has been around for decades and was consistently rejected due to poor economies of scale. Yet Amentum’s chief executive officer, John Heller, describes SMRs as a “transformational technology, a critical enabler in strengthening energy security in the UK and continental Europe.”

However, that “energy security” will be delivered largely by Russia, in order to meet the needs of the fast-reactor designs targeted for Britain. These include the Newcleo 200 MWe lead-cooled fast reactor and the Natrium, TerraPower’s sodium-cooled fast reactor, two US companies looking to secure contracts in the UK. Russia is currently the only country that manufactures the High-Assay Low Enriched Uranium fuel needed for these reactor designs.

When star footballer Marcus Rashford totalled his £700,000 Rolls-Royce in a September 2023 accident, the car was entirely written off. That’s exactly what should happen to the company’s SMR plans before consumers and taxpayers are forced to foot the bill.

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland. She is the author of the book, No to Nuclear: How Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress And Provokes War, published by Pluto Press.

March 29, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, UK | Leave a comment

Deader than a doornail -UK’s new nuclear

Several days after announcing the new cost hikes at Hinkley, news broke about similarly soaring electricity prices predicted for the Sizewell C nuclear power plant, another French twin EPR plant targeted for the steadily eroding and submerging UK Suffolk coast.

 March 15, 2026 by beyondnuclearinternational, https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2026/03/15/deader-than-a-doornail/

Electricity prices from new nuclear plants will be sky high with more delays to completion while jobs don’t materialize.

If you wanted to sum up the most compelling reasons not to build new nuclear power plants, Hinkley Point C, the two-reactor project under construction in Somerset in the UK, encapsulates almost all of them.

When the UK government, still miraculously led by the clinging-by-his-fingernails beleaguered Labour prime minister, Keir Starmer, announced its Golden Age of nuclear last September, obediently gliding in Trump’s gilded wake, it claimed that the new nuclear power plants planned for Britain “will drive down household bills in the long run.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

Far from driving down consumer costs, the Hinkley Point C project, consisting of two 1,630 MW French Evolutionary Power Reactors (EPR), could see the original agreed strike price of $123.50 per megawatt — already considerably higher than the price Britons were paying at the time it was set in 2012 — soar even higher by the time the plant is finished, since prices are designed to increase annually in line with the Consumer Price Index.

The original estimated cost of $24 billion for the two Hinkley C EPRs has now almost tripled, having sky-rocketed to almost $67 billion as announced last week, along with new delays.

In 2007, when EDF first proposed its Hinkley Point C scheme, an officer with the company predicted locals would be cooking their turkeys using electricity from Hinkley C by Christmas 2017. That’s the same year — in March — that construction eventually began. 

The Hinkley C completion date has now been pushed to at least 2030, another deadline extension it probably won’t meet. If the plant does show up in 2030, it will have taken 22 years, 13 longer than planned. 

That’s a long time to wait for those new jobs the UK government’s ‘Golden Age’ promised. “Working people will benefit from jobs and growth as companies in the UK and United States sign major new deals that will turbocharge the build-out of new nuclear power stations in both countries,” said that September announcement, embracing yet more hyperbolic rhetoric.

Several days after announcing the new cost hikes at Hinkley, news broke about similarly soaring electricity prices predicted for the Sizewell C nuclear power plant, another French twin EPR plant targeted for the steadily eroding and submerging UK Suffolk coast.

The Sizewell C project was first proposed in 2010 but there are still no shovels in the ground for the plant itself, only site preparation (for that, read tearing up countryside and precious habitat.)

As revealed in an article in the Daily Telegraph, electricity generated from Sizewell C is likely to cost “almost double today’s prices”. The prediction is a staggering $160 per megawatt hour, and that’s according to the government’s own new report.

Incredibly, despite the track record at Hinkley C, with identical reactor designs to Sizewell, this same government report “assumed no escalation in costs” for the Suffolk project. Such an outcome is, to put it mildly, highly unlikely.

In an recent analysis for OilPrice.com, Leonard S. Hyman, an economist and financial analyst, and William I. Tilles, a senior industry advisor and speaker on energy and finance, predicted that “the prospects for new nuclear (both big and small) are deader than the proverbial doornail.”

They viewed the outlook for the so-called small modular reactors that the UK government is poised to green light as even bleaker. (At around 490MW the favored design from Rolls-Royce isn’t actually that small.) Small reactors will have “projected costs that are much higher than gigawatt-scale reactors, making them even less relevant economically,” they wrote.

And yet, the Starmer and Trump governments each press on with their false and fantastical nuclear fantasy plans regardless.

Linda Pentz Gunter is the founder of Beyond Nuclear and serves as its international specialist. Her book, No To Nuclear. Why Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress and Provokes War, can be pre-ordered now from Pluto Press. (Use the scroll menu at the top of the page to select dollars or pounds for payment.)

March 23, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, UK | Leave a comment