This article is a contribution to the NNWI Conference 2026: Powering Industrial Decarbonisation.
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The fleet deployment of SMRs presents a historic opportunity to revitalise British heavy industry. The UK could once make pressure vessels, boilers, coolant pumps, turbines and other specialist equipment for its first and second generation British-designed reactors, but those capabilities have withered from lack of orders. Hinkley Point C, and now Sizewell C, have been reviving workforce and supply chain capability, but the UK remains at a disadvantage against established foreign suppliers from countries, such as South Korea, which have kept building continuously.
SMRs, with new designs, at smaller sizes, defining new supplier relationships, offer a chance to the UK supply chain to change this. To realise the opportunity, I would highlight three things they need: certainty of demand, a UK qualification and test house for equipment, and a more efficient regulatory approach.
Restoring serious industrial capabilities is a long-term, capital intensive business, with tens of millions of pounds often at stake for each facility. These investment decisions are overwhelmingly conditional on the orders being guaranteed. Our companies need to see proper fleet deployment – several reactors at each site, and several sites at which to build. Three Rolls Royce SMR is a good start, but it must be just the start for Wylfa itself, and the Wylfa project must be the first of many sites.
At a more prosaic level, the UK needs a place where the supply chain can test the equipment it makes. Nuclear-grade equipment must be manufactured, inspected, tested to the very highest standards to guarantee its reliability over decades of operational life. If you can’t validate equipment in the UK, it puts an unnecessary bottleneck on what is otherwise again a highly technical capable supply chain.
The last point is greater regulatory efficiency. John Fingleton’s review of nuclear regulations found that a culture of process over outcome has driven up costs and distended timelines across the sector, and manufacturing in the supply chain is no exception. Testimony from our supply chain companies indicates that UK regulatory processes add layers of documentation, qualification and oversight not required by our competitors in the US, France, Canada and South Korea. That is something for the government and regulator to address, so we don’t trip up our own industrial ambition.
In the end, SMRs won’t create reindustrialisation on their own. The UK needs to define the vision, fix the regulation and get the details right to make it happen.
