Nuclear Doublespeak
The government waking up to the importance and urgency of new nuclear power generation is good news indeed but it may not happen with the speed the announcements imply. The nuclear industry employs some of the finest brains in the country but not all of them are dedicated to what is best for the UK. Some are more committed to their own interests. They are the members of SPAVIN. After procrastinating for 12 years, the Secretary of State told an expectant Commons, in January, that a Sizewell C decision might be made before the end of this parliamentary term. SPAVIN is to blame.
If you wonder why it takes at least four years of discussions with the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) before an application for a new generation plant can even be submitted, SPAVIN is to blame. And then it takes another two years or so to consider it. And the Department of the Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs, has to carry out its own multi-stage review in parallel. The US process is carried out by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission much faster. Certified pre-approved "off-the-shelf" designs and early site permits allow approval for a reactor site to be "banked" for future use. The USA’s single license combines construction with operating and can be acquired in only a year (p.10) compared with six in the UK.
If you have never heard of SPAVIN, that is because it is a secret society: the Society for the Protective Assertion of Vested Interests in Nuclear. Members’ cover is good because they practise the opposite of what they preach. The longer and the more complex, the more consultants put in the bank. For example, recommendation five of the Nuclear Industry and Research Advisory Board’s (NIRAB’s) 2020 report to the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) reads “UK investment in nuclear fission should be leveraged effectively through international R&D programmes.” Apart from demanding £1bn for five years of unspecified research, international programmes are being ignored (“foreign stuff is too risky”). One Small Modular Reactor (SMR) is planned to be available by 2030 and Advanced Modular Reactors (AMRs) will be considered in the next decade. SMRs and AMRs are small reactors that can be transported on the backs of lorries. The former are used in nuclear submarines and both are available today. In short, reality does not match the rhetoric.
The rot set in when some halfwit, back in 2011, set the ONR up as an agency of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), i.e. the government department that stops one doing whatever one should be doing. When the Admiralty, Air Ministry and War Department merged in 1964, the HSE’s equivalent was then also considered as the parent body but the government decided the MoD would make a better job of shrinking the armed forces to the point where they would be no danger to anyone.
The moral of this sad tale is that ONR and the rest of the public service nuclear sector should be focused on providing the most, and of course safest, nuclear power to the UK soonest. Members of SPAVIN need to be detected and rooted out. The UK can only learn from best world practice, if we do what they do today and stop chuntering on about leading the world in nuclear development 60 years ago.