Britons could be taking showers and warming homes with hot water piped directly from a nuclear reactor, under proposals to build small atomic power stations in cities.
Urban nuclear reactors, similar in size to those in nuclear submarines, could generate not only electricity but also hot water, suggests a report by Policy Exchange, a think tank.
The paper reflects government thinking, as the National Nuclear Laboratory has already drawn up plans for a first “small modular reactor” at Trawsfynydd in north Wales. The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has also supported the idea.
“In the next decades, we will need previously unthinkable levels of low carbon electricity for electric vehicles and to replace coal and gas,” said Matthew Rooney of Policy Exchange.
Such a scheme would reverse the traditional policy for nuclear facilities, which is to put them in remote areas to minimise the impact of any radiation leak. Sellafield, Britain’s largest nuclear site, is on the Cumbrian coast.
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Such reactors could be fuelled by plutonium, a waste product of Britain’s existing nuclear industry. Stockpiles exceed 100 tons.
Nuclear power is among the most reliable ways to generate electricity, but has always proven far more expensive than expected.
Rooney said siting small nuclear stations in cities would transform their economics because they could sell waste hot water and make hydrogen gas as a fuel for cars.
“There is no other low-carbon energy which can match nuclear power for scale and reliability . . . The failure of the nuclear industry to prove that it can finance and build large reactors on time and to budget means that the development of small modular reactors must be one of the central goals of government energy policy.”