The ‘Golden Age of Nuclear’ is a Sham
Rejoice! For we are at the dawn of a “golden age of nuclear”, as announced by the Government this week. This new era was marked by British and American firms signing a ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ about building new power stations in northeast England, reflecting new agreements between Governments on either side of the Atlantic.
New micro-modular nuclear power plants will, one day, power “advanced data centres” in Nottinghamshire, and another £80 million investment will supply London Gateway port and business park. And there will be “plans to conduct studies and evaluate sites in the UK for the deployment of the Natrium advanced reactor technology”.
To read the rest of this article, you need to donate at least £5/month or £50/year to the Daily Sceptic, then create an account on this website. The easiest way to create an account after you’ve made a donation is to click on the ‘Log In’ button on the main menu bar, click ‘Register’ underneath the sign-in box, then create an account, making sure you enter the same email address as the one you used when making a donation. Once you’re logged in, you can then read all our paywalled content, including this article. Being a Donor will also entitle you to comment below the line and access the premium content in the Sceptic, our weekly podcast. A one-off donation of at least £5 will also entitle you to the same benefits for one month. You can donate here.
There are more details about how to create an account, and a number of things you can try if you’re already a donor – and have an account – but cannot access the above perks on our Premium page.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Thanks for this interesting and informative article
Indeed.
I often wonder though what will happen the next time a NP Station goes pop.
If the other pops are anything to go by, not much.
New drilling techniques mean that geothermal power, which will last millions of years, can be exploited everywhere, not just volcanic areas.
Hydrocarbons are natural abiotic substances, made at the core and mantle, entirely renewable. They are not generated by fossils which are rocks FFS nor from Dino tissue or Devonian algae.
Drill. Drill. Drill.
Do you have a source for that?
Other than planning permissions req’d to permit these drilling operations, which for geothermal also allows making cracks in the rocks at depth (called “fracking” if going for gas), there is nothing i’m aware of that stops real investors to spot the opportunity and hand over their money. Preferably governments will defer to real investors on this “opportunity” (possibly [sic] appropriate here).
There are many YouTube videos on the subject by various authors, Most of them look genuine to me but I may, of course, be wrong as I am no expert.
Cost?
Iceland has already found that if you try to extract too much energy it start to cause cooling and reduce the temperature gradient.
So it isn’t just about wasting money and time on silly things which “solve” imagined problems – it’s also about lost opportunity to spend that time and money solving real problems. Who knew?!
Indeed- and we now have actual problems we need to solve that are entirely caused by previous supposed attempts to solve imaginary problems, which we are attempting to solve by doing more of the same
It’s pitiful. I have a calm, smart, practical friend who works in electricity distribution who still pulls out his smartphone and tells me, on a sunny, blustery midsummer’s day,
“Look how much energy we’re getting right now from wind and solar!”
Sigh.
Sigh indeed
I hope you pull yours out on a cloudy windless day and do the same
I hope too that he corrects him and lets him know that even on the very best day, all it’s doing is producing electricity and not the other 80% of our energy that we get from, mostly, nuclear and hydrocarbons…
Reform must make a manifesto commitment to set up a new Energy Ministry and allow the old Ministry to wither on the vine.
There is no need to include ‘Climate change’ in the new Ministry’s title.
https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2025-07/DOE_Critical_Review_of_Impacts_of_GHG_Emissions_on_the_US_Climate_July_2025.pdf
So plenty of power will be made available for the data centres that will be needed to collate the vast amounts of information needed to run an effective social credit system, but what’s left over for us will be ruinously expensive with the planned intention of our impoverishment, ending consumerism and controlling every aspect of our lives.
Do we actually need or want these sodding data centres, their only purpose is to spy on us .
To be honest, I think their primary function is to further the grift.
IMHO those at the very top, Gates, the Rockefellers, etc, they definitely want to spy on us and control us, but for the management class it’s pure grift.
It looks as if the proposition of local power generation to high energy plants, like the proposed AI processing sites, is just another case of what happens at some operations that already do that =, rather than taking all their supply in from the National Grid. E.g. steel works, sewage treatment plant (using anaerobic digestion). No doubt it is an opportunity for the manufacturers of SMRs, though.
Does this mean that the data centres will not become operational until their personal nuclear power plant also achieves that status?
Double the opportunity for the government to screw up!
See my response to Jack the Dog – imho this is nothing more than yet another grift.
It feels as if every man and his dog is now getting into businesses which depend on other people spending other people’s money on your “solutions”.
I have been wondering how US airforce and other bases will keep going in the UK and I think we now know. They will have nukes to sustain their electricity needs while the grid around them collapses. I wonder if critical UK defence sites ewill get the same: submarine base, RAF bases and GCHQ. Oh, I almost foregot – Whitehall!!
The large round building you refer to already has I’m sure more than enough offline power generation capability, n+1 or 2 levels of redundancy in it and vast stores of fuel… it did in the 70’s… so not much of a change there.
The government policy of just ‘hoping’ and ‘wishing’ harder that all the good things happen, the pixies at the end of the garden (and the renewable providers) somehow make it all dispatchable and reliable like they’ve promised they can… if only we all HOPE enough…
Back on real street – real energy users are sorting themselves out.
I’ve just had a terrible attack of Deja-vu. When I was a schoolboy over. 50 years ago nuclear was the way forward and gas and oil were about to disappear, in those days because we were about to run out. Not much has changed, and realistically, nothing much will change. Except the economies running on gas and oil will do well, those on windmills and sunshine will fail.
When was there ever a bandwagon politicians weren’t keen to jump on?
If it looks like it’s going somewhere, they’re all over it.
The moment it’s looking like failure, they can’t distance themselves quickly enough.
The better you are at sniffing out these shifts and positioning yourself accordingly, the better a politician your are. In fact, that’s pretty much the job.
Nuclear is the most expensive form of spinning generation of electricity. Every nuclear power station ever built has relied on massive taxpayer support. The current Hinckley Point C finished in 2017… or 2021… or 2025.. or 2030ish… is over twice original cost estimate. Previous Governments refused to hand over taxpayer money but Mad Ed is going to, and in any case a price to market of £128 per MWh, inflation-linked for reactor lifetime has been guaranteed. France: EDF, owner of France’s 59 aging reactor fleet was unable to raise private capital to replace these so has been renationalised so the French taxpayer will pay. Ironically it is EDF with the Chinese funding (struggling) Hinckley. Net Zero is a fantasy in the minds of people who have no understanding of basic physics or economics. If we have coal generation and gas, there is no need for nuclear. Nuclear has entered the fray because it is near zero CO2 emissions and overall makes more sense than wind or solar, but take away the “need” to reduce CO2 emissions and the whole argument for nuclear and solar/wind evaporates. Electricity supply after privatisation was never a problem, and prices dropped, service improved until the… Read more »
I am dubious about how much of NESO’s planned expansion can actually be delivered by 2030 remembering that NESO lives in La La Land.
So US approved SMRs can go ahead immediately while Rolls Royce still is held up by the very fussy slow British regulator. Trump wins again while Starmer doesn’t even know he’s lost.
And let’s remember that even that £54.67 per MWhr for gas fired generation includes extra costs (carbon emissions permits) imposed by the green fanatics. Coal, of course, is even cheaper, without the green distortions, but we have dynamited our coal fired power stations, while other countries build new ones.
“[China] began building 94.5 gigawatts (GW) of new coal-power capacity and resumed 3.3GW of suspended projects in 2024, the highest level of construction in the past 10 years.”
https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-construction-of-new-coal-power-plants-reached-10-year-high-in-2024/
Even Germany still has 41 coal fired power stations.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/859266/number-of-coal-power-plants-by-country/
This is why our industrial electricity is literally the most expensive in the world.