Rolls-Royce: We can win the nuclear power race

The boss of Rolls-Royce says he is confident the engineering giant will win the race to develop Britain’s first fleet of mini nuclear power plants ‘on merit’.

Tufan Erginbilgic, who has led Rolls since the beginning of the year, said the company was in pole position to triumph in an international competition launched by Ministers because its designs are so advanced.

Rolls has spearheaded a British consortium designing small modular reactors (SMRs) for several years and has won more than £200 million of Government funding to develop the project.

Small nuclear reactors have become a key part of the UK’s long-term energy strategy.

Many in the industry were surprised when Ministers then opened a competition worldwide to search for the best SMR project – pitting Rolls against foreign rivals thought to include Hitachi and General Electric. Another is TerraPower, which is backed by Bill Gates. A shortlist is due to be announced later this year.

Sir John Rose, the chief executive of Rolls from 1996 to 2011, last week said the global contest was ‘self-defeating’. He added that any risk that the Rolls design might not be ‘best in class’ would be outweighed by the overall gains that could be made by backing Rolls.

The FTSE 100 company is keen to export its SMRs to other countries, which it claims could create 40,000 UK jobs by 2050 and boost the economy by £52 billion.

Erginbilgic told The Mail on Sunday: ‘The important thing is that with the work we’ve done we will be selected on merit.

‘We’ve done lots of work and are the most advanced of the SMR programmes. Our know-how is transferred from 60 years of working on nuclear submarines.’

Rolls’ SMRs will cost about £2 billion each. The design is based on the technology that powers the Royal Navy’s nuclear submarine fleet.

Erginbilgic’s comments came after Rolls revealed last week that it has swung back into profit. The firm currently makes most of its money from servicing engines on commercial planes such as Boeing 787s and Airbus A350s, but it also works in defence and power.

Erginbilgic is preparing a major overhaul of the company and will announce his new strategy in November.

As well as SMRs, the Government aims to build several large nuclear power plants. The most advanced of these is Sizewell C in Suffolk, but funding has not yet been secured.

Ministers are trying to woo pension funds into backing the project, but several have said they are not interested.

Sizewell C was dealt another blow this weekend when The People’s Pension, which has six million members, said it has no plans to back the plant.

In a letter seen by The Mail on Sunday, the group said: ‘Direct investment into nuclear power infrastructure projects is not part of The People’s Pension investment strategy and we will not be investing directly into Sizewell C.’

Alison Downes of the Stop Sizewell C campaign group said: ‘The Government may be throwing money at Sizewell C, but their target investors are rapidly backing away. The People’s Pension has seen the writing on the wall and won’t let their savers anywhere near this expensive, risky project.’

A spokesman for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said it had ‘launched a fair and transparent competition that will provide a range of companies the opportunity to develop the best SMR technologies in the world’.