SPECIAL REPORT | FINDING NEW SITES
Seeking a nuclear neighbourhood
Great Britain’s ‘Midlands’ region has key industries, innovative universities and skilled workers, including in the nuclear industry. Advocates say the region would benefit from hosting nuclear generation as well.
THE ‘MIDLANDS’ REGION OF GREAT Britain is economically diverse, with industrial and manufacturing companies and a skilled industrial and technical workforce. It has a strong heritage of industrial innovation, creating new opportunities in green industries including hydrogen, nuclear, renewables and synthetic fuels. Midlands Nuclear says the region needs increasing amounts of power for electrifying sectors such as logistics, as well as for cities like Birmingham, Leicester and Nottingham. It also needs heat for industry. The Midlands Nuclear Siting Study, commissioned and funded by the Midlands Net Zero Hub, aims to provide an evidence base to support nuclear build in the region: it wants to position the region to lead the UK’s clean energy development, industrial decarbonisation and net zero delivery. The region has a longstanding nuclear licensed site in Derby (where Rolls Royce is based), and a new fusion project – the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) – at West Burton, an ex coal-fired station site. It also included, at Theddlethorpe in Lincolnshire, a potential location for a deep geological waste repository, a project that local councils have now rejected (see below). However, the region has never hosted nuclear generation. The closest plants were outside the region – the Hartlepool site well north of the Humber estuary, and Berkeley in Gloucestershire. In contrast, the region has always been a fossil fuel powerhouse, housing over 18 GW of largely
coal-fired generating plant, built between the 1950s and the 1980s. This has all now closed – but that does not mean there is necessarily spare grid capacity, and in fact a national project to expand the GB grid includes projects to reduce congestion in the Midlands. Network capacity that was freed up by plant closure was often quickly reconfigured, for example to serve new onshore wind. However, on a case-by-case basis spare capacity does
exist; and for Midlands Nuclear the key is that “The national electricity grid has… developed around the production and use of electricity in the Midlands and is well suited to a return to this status”. Nuclear can be located close to demand for both power and heat, in contrast to GB’s offshore wind, which requires power to be transported sometimes hundreds of miles to customers.
Finding new nuclear sites With its cities and towns the Midlands has among the country’s most densely populated areas outside London and this is one of the reasons for its lack of nuclear sites. Two changes mean Midlands Nuclear is now advocating for nuclear reactors in its region: new designs for small modular reactors (SMRs) and advanced reactors (AMRs) have smaller requirements for land, cooling water and other resources; and a new approach to site selection, and development consent opens many more potential sites than before.
Above: The Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) will be located at West Burton on the site of a former coal-fired power station Source: EDF Energy
26 | August 2025 |
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