>As in the UK we were previously asking a French-Chinese partnership to build here so not sure why Canada didn’t get chosen for that.
Its crazy how fast britain has fallen off nuclear, the original british nuclear rollout should have stood the UK up as a permanent nuclear energy powerhouse but France took it from them.
> should have stood the UK up as a permanent nuclear energy powerhouse
It was a crash weapons program disguised as a civilian energy program, that very nearly went badly wrong at Windscale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire ; so much so that the site had to be renamed to Sellafield.
The rollout was hampered by the choice of two ultimately dead end technologies, Magnox and AGR. Then it ran into the industrial unrest and general lack of money of the 1970s, during which the government cancelled its space program (Black Arrow), and very nearly cancelled Concorde. The "white heat of technology" had worn off. Thatcher attempted to restart it, resulting in Sizewell B, but of course after 26 April 1986 any new nuclear was completely unthinkable and that was the end until Hinkley C. Which is still not finished.
If not aware - uk government is backing Roll Royce to produce small reactor solutions (SMR). And Rolls is going around the world signing up sales agreements for them.
The underlying tech though is yet to be proven, so some risk won’t deliver on time/to budget/at all.
The problem isn’t the technology, it’s the economics.
The assembly and economies of scale for “mass production” have not been proven in practice; who will you sell the countless expensive ones before it gets cheaper?
And the smaller reactor has diseconomies of scale working against it for the electricity it produces. So the $/MWh price is much higher than for larger reactors.
Its crazy how fast britain has fallen off nuclear, the original british nuclear rollout should have stood the UK up as a permanent nuclear energy powerhouse but France took it from them.