Rolls-Royce Group, BNF Resources UK Limited and Exelon Generation Limited will invest £195m across a period of around three years. The funding will enable the business to secure grant funding of £210 million from UK Research and Innovation funding, first announced by the UK Prime Minister in ‘The Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution’.
The business, which will continue to seek further investment, will now proceed rapidly with a range of parallel delivery activities, including entry to the statutory UK Generic Design Assessment (GDA) approval process and identifying sites for the factories which will manufacture the modules that enable on-site assembly of the power plants. Discussions will also continue with the UK Government on identifying the delivery models that will enable long-term investment in this technology. Rolls-Royce SMR is engaging with export customers too.
Business and energy secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said: “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the UK to deploy more low carbon energy than ever before and ensure greater energy independence. Small Modular Reactors offer exciting opportunities to cut costs and build more quickly, ensuring we can bring clean electricity to people’s homes and cut our already-dwindling use of volatile fossil fuels even further. In working with Rolls-Royce, we are proud to back the largest engineering collaboration the UK has ever seen - uniting some of the most respected and innovating organisations on the planet. Not only can we maximise British content, create new intellectual property and reinvigorate supply chains, but also position our country as a global leader in innovative nuclear technologies we can potentially export elsewhere. By harnessing British engineering and ingenuity, we can double down on our plan to deploy more home-grown, affordable clean energy in this country.”
Rolls-Royce SMR is using proven nuclear technology, drawing upon standard nuclear energy technology that has been used in 400 reactors around the world, coupled with a unique factory-made module manufacturing and on-site assembly system, to harness decades of British engineering, design and manufacturing knowhow.
Nine-tenths of an individual Rolls-Royce SMR power plant will be built or assembled in factory conditions and around 80% could be delivered by a UK supply chain. Much of the venture’s investment is expected to be focused in the North of the UK, where there is significant existing nuclear expertise.
A Rolls-Royce SMR power station will have the capacity to generate 470MW of low carbon energy, equivalent to more than 150 onshore wind turbines. It will occupy the footprint of two football pitches and power approximately one million homes.