Rolls-Royce recently announced that it has established its Small Modular Reactor (SMR) business. The Rolls-Royce Group, BNF Resources UK Limited and Exelon Generation Limited will invest €228 million across a period of around three years, which will enable the business to secure grant funding of €246 million from UK Research and Innovation funding
A visualisation of Small Modular Reactor by the Rolls-Royce SMR business. Credit: Rolls-Royce website
Rolls-Royce recently announced that it has established its Small Modular Reactor business. The Rolls-Royce Group, BNF Resources UK Limited and Exelon Generation Limited will invest €228 million across a period of around three years, which will enable the business to secure grant funding of €246 million from UK Research and Innovation funding. The UKRI funding was first announced by the UK Prime Minister in ‘The Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution’.
Warren East, Rolls-Royce CEO said: “The SMR programme is one of the ways that Rolls-Royce is meeting the need to ensure the UK continues to develop innovative ways to tackle the global threat of climate change. The business could create up to 40,000 jobs, through UK deployment and export enabled growth. As a major shareholder in Rolls-Royce SMR, we will continue to support its path to successful deployment.”
UK government’s Business and Energy Secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng said: “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.”
Tom Samson, CEO, Rolls-Royce SMR, said: “Rolls-Royce SMR has been established to deliver a low cost, deployable, scalable and investable programme of new nuclear power plants. Our transformative approach to delivering nuclear power, based on predictable factory-built components, is unique and the nuclear technology is proven. Investors see a tremendous opportunity to decarbonise the UK through stable baseload nuclear power, in addition to fulfilling a vital export need as countries identify nuclear as an opportunity to decarbonise.”
Nine-tenths of an individual Rolls-Royce small modular reactor power plant will be built or assembled in factory conditions and around 80% could be delivered by a UK supply chain – a unique offering in energy infrastructure in the UK.
A single Rolls-Royce SMR power station will occupy the footprint of two football pitches and power approximately one million homes. It can support both on-grid electricity and a range of off-grid clean energy solutions, enabling the decarbonisation of industrial processes and the production of clean fuels, such as sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) and green hydrogen, to support the energy transition in the wider heat and transportation sectors.
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