Picture this: it’s the 1950s and a quiet corner of Cumbria lights up the world, literally. Calder Hall, the planet’s first commercial nuclear power station, flicks the switch in 1956. Britain isn’t just in the nuclear club; it’s running the place. Fast-forward seventy years and the mood feels very different. Most of those pioneering reactors are long retired, the country hasn’t finished building a new one since the era of Oasis and Tamagotchis, and nuclear supplies barely one-seventh of our electricity. So when politicians now talk about a “a golden age of nuclear”, you’re forgiven for raising an eyebrow.
From World Leader to Expensive Afterthought
The numbers are brutal. In 2023 nuclear made up just 14% of UK electricity, according to the latest IEA figures. France? A cool 65%. Even Belgium and Sweden do better than us. We went from having more reactors than America, Russia and France put together to becoming the single most expensive place on Earth to build them. That’s quite the fall from grace.
Yet something has shifted in the last couple of years. Geopolitics, sky-high gas prices, and the hard reality of net-zero deadlines have put nuclear firmly back on the agenda. Suddenly Westminster is throwing money and political capital at atomic projects big and, interestingly, small. The question everyone is asking is simple: can Britain actually pull this off, or are we just repeating the same old mistakes with better PR?
The Big Beasts: Sizewell C and Beyond
If you want drama, look at Hinkley Point C in Somerset. Originally meant to cost £18 billion and switch on in 2017, the latest estimates have the bill nudging £35-38 billion and first power slipping to the early 2030s. Ouch. But the government insists the next one will be cheaper because we’ll have “learnt the lessons”.
Enter Sizewell C in Suffolk – essentially Hinkley’s twin, but this time using a brand-new funding model called the Regulated Asset Base (RAB). The clever bit? Investors start getting paid during construction rather than waiting ten-plus years for the plant to generate a single watt. In theory that should attract pension funds and insurance companies who love steady, long-term returns.
“Sizewell C will deliver clean power to six million homes for at least sixty years.”
Government spokesperson, 2025
Whether that sixty-year promise survives contact with reality remains to be seen, but the political will is clearly there. Great British Nuclear (yes, that really is the name) has already bought land in Gloucestershire and Wales for future giant plants. The ambition is to hit 24 GW of nuclear capacity by 2050 – roughly a quarter of projected electricity demand.
The Small Bet: Are SMRs the Game-Changer?
While the mega-projects grab headlines, a quieter revolution is happening in factory halls across the country. Rolls-Royce has been chosen as the UK’s preferred designer for small modular reactors – essentially nuclear power plants that arrive on the back of a few lorries rather than requiring a decade-long civil-engineering epic.
The pitch is seductive: factory-built, standardised, safer thanks to passive cooling, and – crucially – much cheaper per unit once you’re making dozens of them. The first trio is slated for Wylfa in North Wales, though nobody is brave enough yet to pin an exact date on commercial operation.
- Power output per module: ~470 MW (enough for a medium city)
- Construction time: claimed 4-5 years vs 10-15 for large plants
- Cost target: eventually under £2 billion per unit
Sceptics – and there are plenty – point out that not a single SMR anywhere in the world is yet feeding revenue-generating electricity into a grid. The early 2030s is the most optimistic timetable anyone credible will offer. Still, the fact that the government is willing to back both the traditional giants and the new kids on the block shows they’re not putting all their uranium in one basket.
The Talent Crunch Nobody Wants to Talk About
Here’s a slightly awkward truth: we’re brilliant at theoretical physics and world-class universities, but we haven’t actually welded a reactor vessel together in three decades. One fund manager I spoke to recently put it bluntly: “We have plenty of book smarts, but the hands-on nuclear craftsmen? They retired years ago.”
The government’s response has been a flurry of apprenticeships, PhD funding, and attempts to lure mid-career engineers from oil & gas. There’s even talk of an “Energy Skills Passport” to fast-track workers into nuclear sites. It’s encouraging, but turning a national skills desert into an oasis in less than ten years feels ambitious, to put it mildly.
Supply Chain Nightmares and Russian Roulette
Even if we solve the money and the manpower, we still need the actual fuel. And right now the uranium market is, frankly, a mess. Four countries dominate enriched uranium supply suitable for Western reactors, one of them being Russia. After recent geopolitical unpleasantness, the UK has promised to stop importing Russian nuclear fuel by 2028.
Good luck with that. Global uranium demand is expected to rise 28% by 2030 and more than double by 2040. Prices have already trebled in the last few years. Unless Western nations dramatically expand mining and enrichment capacity (and they are trying), we risk swapping dependence on Russian gas for dependence on… well, Russian uranium or its close allies.
“We have to build the entire value chain, not just the power stations. Otherwise we’ll have the same vulnerability we had with gas.”
European infrastructure investor, 2025
Advanced Reactors and Fusion Dreams
Beyond light-water SMRs there’s an even more exotic zoo: reactors cooled by molten lead (Newcleo), sodium, or gas. Some promise to burn nuclear waste as fuel, dramatically reducing long-lived radioactive waste. Most are still at the demonstration stage and eye-wateringly expensive, but the UK is sprinkling money on several British hopefuls.
Then there’s fusion – the holy grail that has been “thirty years away” for about seventy years. UK-based Tokamak Energy and First Light Fusion are both privately funded and making genuine technical strides. The government recently committed £2.5 billion toward a prototype fusion plant. Don’t hold your breath for it powering your kettle this decade, but it’s no longer pure science fiction either.
So Can Britain Actually Do This?
Let’s be honest – the track record isn’t exactly stellar. Costs spiral, timelines slip, and public opinion remains nervous (Windscale in 1957 and Chernobyl in 1986 still loom large in the collective memory). Yet there are genuine green shoots.
New funding models are attracting real money. Regulatory reform is (long overdue) is finally happening. Cross-party political support looks solid for the first time in decades. And the energy security argument has never been stronger.
My take? The UK will get some new nuclear online by the mid-2030s – Sizewell C will probably make it, and at least one or two SMRs should be spinning. But hitting that 24 GW by 2050 target while simultaneously building tens of gigawatts of offshore wind and keeping the lights on? That’s going to require execution we honestly haven’t shown since the Magnox programme of the 1960s.
Still, if any country loves a plucky underdog story, it’s Britain. We invented the thing, after all. Maybe, just maybe, we can surprise ourselves and actually pull it off.
The lights of Calder Hall flickered on once before. Whether they’ll shine again as brightly is now down to engineers, politicians, investors – and perhaps a bit of that famous British stubbornness.
