Why small modular nuclear reactors should be made in Sheffield - by Richard Caborn

Due to the cost and difficulty of building the large reactors used at Hinkley and Sizewell Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) are being proposed as a viable alternative.

Ranging from 70 MW to 440MW SMRs can be largely factory built, reducing costs and avoiding delays due to weather.

If the government takes the decision to build SMRs Sheffield is ideally placed to be the centre of manufacture.

Sheffield Forgemasters will play a major role in any SMR programme. In 2021 the UK government nationalised the company to secure the supply of parts that are vital for the Royal Navy’s ships and submarines.

As part of the nationalisation programme the Ministry of Defence plans to invest over £400m to upgrade the critical equipment and infrastructure required to secure its military production capability.

Forgemasters now has a unique capability and is the only company in the UK that can forge, machine and assemble SMR components.

South Yorkshire is also home to the Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre and a branch of the Advanced Forming Research Centre, both part of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult and ideally placed to support a local supply chain and deliver continuous improvement to the SMR manufacturing programme.

The Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine have clearly demonstrated the need to manufacture in the UK and build resilient supply chains to secure the availability of critical components.

The energy crisis and its impact on the cost of living and climate change have highlighted the need to find alternative forms of energy and nuclear power generation can certainly play its part.

Making Sheffield a centre of nuclear manufacturing will create high value jobs and help to address the levelling-up problem, so often cited by the UK Government.

Prof Keith Ridgway and I have been working for some time on developing the Sheffield SMR Consortium under the Sheffield Advanced Forgings Research Group.

This consortium, along with an international developer have presented to the energy minister and BEIS officials funded an end-to-end proposal to deliver a First of a Kind (FOAK)1 GW of British built SMR production that will be generating electricity on the national grid by 2030.

This FOAK British-built SMR would provide solid evidence of British engineering capability and give confidence to developers and investors that the nuclear industry does not deserve the tag of overpriced and over-run on time and costs.

Sheffield should change the Whitehall mindset and treat the building of SMRs as an engineering challenge and not an energy problem.

I have written to Prime Minister Liz Truss to ask her to give serious consideration to the proposals.

In December, Sheffield Forgemasters became the first Sheffield firm to sign up with the University of Strathclyde’s Advanced Forming Research Centre, part of the National Manufacturing Institute Scotland.The Sheffield office is run by manufacturing guru Keith Ridgway who co-founded the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre in Rotherham. The move gave Forgemasters access to the AFRC’s state-of-the-art research and development facilities in Renfrewshire.

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