Nuclear Power in Scotland – Not economic, Not wanted, Not needed, Not safe

SMRs are worse than conventional nuclear reactors

Published in The National, February 10, 2025.

The UK (in its latest guise of English Labour) won’t give up on its never-ending quest to screw Scotland. Not only has it stolen our oil and gas and now our renewables, it’s trying to force us to accept uneconomic, unwanted, unneeded and unsafe SMRs (Small Modular Reactors).

Because FM Swinney refuses to allow any new nuclear plants in Scotland, English Labour’s Scottish satrap Anas Sarwar accused him of depriving Scotland of billions in investment and thousands of jobs. This is the same dude who couldn’t even save Grangemouth and its 500 jobs, after vowing he would.

I take great pleasure in exposing Sarwar and Starmer’s lies about nuclear power in general and SMRs in particular. But first,

What are SMRs?

SMRs are “small” nuclear reactors that produce 300 megawatts of electrical power or less, are assembled in a centralised facility, and installed in modules on site. They differ from conventional nuclear plants, which are around 1,000 megawatts and are custom-built.

83 designs are under development around the world, but just two (in Russia and China) are operational. Both are performing at less than 30% capacity and have been plagued by cost escalations and time overruns. According to the World Nuclear Energy Status Report, these problems “make it even less likely that SMRs will become commercialised.”

So, English Labour is trying to force onto Scotland plants that aren’t even commercially viable. It’s regurgitating the marketing hot air from a desperate industry that’s frantically funding pathetic careerists like Sarwar, Starmer and the Viceroy who are pushing this crap. The UK Nuclear Industry Association boasted in September:

The places where nuclear is strong are also the places who put the Labour Party into government. Hartlepool on Teesside, Heysham on Morecambe Bay, Torness in East Lothian, and Sizewell on the Suffolk Coast host all our operational nuclear power stations, and all were Labour gains at the last election.

Read on if you want to know the gory details of this latest English Labour con.

SMRs aren’t cheaper - they’re more expensive

Like their larger cousins, SMRs make ZERO economic sense. In the US, a Utah SMR saw costs jump 53%, from $58/MWh in 2021 to $89/MWh in 2023, and that’s despite $4bn in government subsidies. The project was cancelled.

Costs aren’t driven by size but by the costs of producing a kilowatt-hour of electricity. So applying the principle of economies of scale, smaller reactors will produce more expensive electricity than larger ones.

Labour’s claim that SMRs will be cheaper than conventional reactors is therefore a lie.

SMRs are just as dangerous as large reactors

Advocates claim that because SMRs produce heat at lower rates than large reactors, they’ll be easier to cool during an accident and not need electrically powered coolant pumps. But these so-called “passive emergency systems” won’t work during earthquakes, floods or wildfires and can make accidents worse by depleting the cooling water of boron, which is needed to keep the reactor safely shut down after an accident.

The UK is no doubt aware that the US has loosened SMR safety and security measures, making it easier to exempt new reactors from requirements to have a physical containment structure, an emergency evacuation plan, and an exclusion zone separating the plant from densely populated areas. It’s even considering allowing SMRs to cut the numbers of armed security guards who protect the plant from terrorist attacks.

SMRs won’t reduce or solve the radioactive waste problem - they’ll make it worse

Proponents claim SMRs will produce less radioactive waste than large reactors but a study published in the May 2022 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) reached the opposite conclusion:

https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2022/05/small-modular-reactors-produce-high-levels-nuclear-waste

SMRs generate 9x more neutron-activated steel and hence more radioactivity than conventional plants, so will have more neutron leakage. This increases the amount and toxicity of their waste streams which will be hugely expensive to safely manage. Further, the “spent nuclear fuel from SMRs will be discharged in greater volumes per unit energy extracted and can be far more complex than the spent fuel discharged from existing power plants.”

Businesses like data centres that want an on-site SMR simply won’t have the necessary waste infrastructure to safely manage and store large quantities of radioactive waste. Communities with an SMR will be de facto long-term nuclear waste disposal sites.

Scotland hasn’t even gotten rid of its existing, old and cracked nuclear plants

Scotland is stuck with the ageing Torness reactor that is riddled with 46 cracks until 2030 because EDF has deemed it ‘safe’ to continue operations. Decommissioning a plant takes 20 years. Hunterston B in Ayrshire is being decommissioned and three other plants at more advanced decommissioning stages, Dounreay, Chapelcross, and Hunterston A, have left the land and sea contaminated for hundreds of thousands of years.

Renewables are far cheaper and safer

To repeat what is well known and documented, renewable energy is not only safer than nuclear, it’s much cheaper.

New nuclear: £109/MWh
Offshore Wind: £44/MWh
Onshore Wind: £38/MWh
Large-scale Solar: £41/MWh

And Scotland is loaded with the stuff. In 2022, renewables generated the equivalent of 113% of Scotland’s total electricity consumption, a 26% increase over 2021.

Here’s the bottom line. Even if nuclear power was a safe and economic energy source, Scotland wouldn’t need it. The fact that English Labour is trying to dump it onto Scotland when it knows it’s uneconomic, unwanted, unneeded and unsafe is CRIMINAL.

Come on Scotland, how much more of this abuse are we going to take?

If you haven’t already, please sign the petition to give the Scottish People their international human and political rights and the tools they need to exercise their sovereignty so they can, if they so choose, end this literally toxic union.