The UK's countryside could be filled with small nuclear reactors after billionaire announces £35bn new investment

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• Polish billionaire Michał Sołowow's SGE announces £35bn plan to build 14 GE Vernova Hitachi BWRX-300 reactors across three UK sites
• The project aims to deliver 4.2GW of power starting in 2034, effectively powering 8m homes for over 60 years
• The project is looking to secure government backing, with guaranteed prices intended to be locked in for the power producer before it would be offered to investors

Small modular nuclear reactors seem to be back in favor globally, and a consortium of investors is now looking to bring the technology back to the UK as part of a push to both meet environmental goals and increase energy security in an increasingly volatile world.

Poland-based SGE (Synthos Green Energy) is looking to build up to 14 reactors across three locations in the UK, with six at its primary site and four each at its two secondary sites.

With an estimated build-out cost of £35 billion ($46.5 billion), the project, if approved, is expected to be one of the biggest SMR projects the UK government signs on to as part of its Advanced Nuclear Framework, unveiled earlier this year, to support the development of privately funded projects.

A sign of things to come?

Unlike more monolithic nuclear reactor designs, Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) have not only a lower power footprint but also a smaller overall site footprint than older, larger reactors.

The first disclosed site for SME's project, Oldbury in South Gloucestershire, is a former Magnox nuclear station that generated up to 434MW of power, is now expected to be home to as many as six 300W SMRs, according to SGE's plans.

While the other two sites are not yet publicly named, they are expected to have a 4+4 reactor split, bringing the total to 14 reactors.

Part of the reason the UK government is interested in outsourcing power generation, even nuclear, to private equity is that it expects a spike in power demand from AI datacenters over the next few years, even as the nation's overall power needs increase.

This is also why Google Cloud, a key AI data center player, has joined in on SME's project as a strategic partner that could, as per Michał Sołowow, invest as much as £4.5 billion in data centers in the country to make use of some of the added capacity.

Given that both SMRs (including the proposed GE Vernova Hitachi BWRX-300) and data centers require access to water and space for construction, one can assume that both will prefer cheap, easily accessible coastal, estuarine, or riverside land, which means that the UK's countryside could soon see certain areas change meaningfully in terms of aesthetics at the very least.

Smaller rivers, however, might not cut it, as SMRs also require the water bodies they use to act as 'heatsinks' for their operation, and 6 or 4 in the same location might overwhelm them, limiting the number of areas that are viable for such buildouts, which means that SME's proposed project might set the baseline for how privatized nuclear power will shape the UK countryside in the days to come even as AI data center demand is expected to increase pressure on the national grid.

For now, SME's proposal has yet to be approved by the government, making the £35 billion figure an estimate that may or may not apply, given that it still needs to secure financing and lock in government guarantees on pricing before it moves meaningfully towards construction.

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