Rolls-Royce SMR, the UK-based global power and propulsion system manufacturing group Rolls-Royce’s small modular nuclear reactor (SMR) subsidiary, hopes that it will receive UK regulatory approval for its design in about two years, and be generating power before the end of this decade. So Rolls-Royce SMR chairperson Paul Stein has told the Reuters news agency.

The regulatory approval process for the SMR began last month. “[It] will likely complete in the middle of 2024,” he said, “we are trying to work with the UK Government, and others to get going now placing orders, so that we can get power on grid by 2029.”

Rolls-Royce is heading a consortium with nine major members (including Rolls-Royce), comprising both companies and institutions, to develop and manufacture the SMR. The other consortium members are Assystem, Atkins, BAM Nuttall, Jacobs, Laing O’Rourke, the (UK) National Nuclear Laboratory, the Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre and TWI (previously known as The Welding Institute). Rolls-Royce SMR is the ‘special purpose vehicle’ created by the consortium to execute the programme.

Rolls-Royce’s SMR is a 470 MWe design (bigger than many other SMR designs and proposals) and is based on a small pressurised water reactor (PWR) design. (Rolls-Royce is responsible for the design and manufacture of the small PWRs that power the UK Royal Navy’s nuclear-powered submarines.)

It is indeed fully modularised. The reactor will have dimensions of about 16 m by 4 m and will be able to be transported by rail, road or water. The consortium aims to be able to build an entire SMR power plant in 500 days. The complete SMR NPP would occupy a site the size of about five-and-a-half football (soccer) fields.

The regulatory process started last month when the UK department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy formally asked the UK Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR), England’s Environmental Agency (EA) and Natural Resources Wales to carry out a Generic Design Assessment (GDA) of the SMR design. The GDA is a process to evaluate the safety, security and environmental protection elements of a design for a nuclear power plant intended for construction in Great Britain (there are no nuclear power plants in Northern Ireland). Passing the GDA would result in the ONR issuing a ‘Design Acceptance Confirmation’ and the EA releasing a ‘Statement of Design Acceptability’.

Rapid expansion of the country’s nuclear power capacity, using both large reactors and SMRs, is part of the UK’s recently released ‘Energy Security Strategy’. The aim is to have 24 MWe of nuclear generating capacity by 2050. Outside the UK, Rolls-Royce SMR already has memoranda of understanding with companies in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Turkey and the US.