The Parallel Universe of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) Scotland’s Place in the Narrative

23 December 2025

The Parallel Universe of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) Scotland’s Place in the Narrative

Nuclear Monitor #933

Tracy Patrick

As a fiction writer, I’m faced with alternate narrative possibilities, and the different ways a story might end. But even in the strangest fantastical tales, for example, Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland, or Herman Hesse’s, The Glass Bead Game, there has to be a certain amount of believability.

The same might be said of theoretical physics. In 1983, Professors Stephen Hawking and James Hartle, published a seminal paper, ‘Wave Function of the Universe,’ implying that the Big Bang created not just one universe, but an infinite number of parallel universes, existing simultaneously: universes in which anything was possible.

Fast forward to May 1986. It’s a beautiful spring day, and I’m standing in the garden of my grannie’s council house, under a vast blue sky dotted with cotton wool clouds, unable to believe that, floating above me, is radioactive fallout. Chernobyl has just happened and, in the aftermath, heavy rain has caused widespread contamination in the UK and Europe, resulting in the FSA (Food Standards Agency) imposing restrictions on nearly ten thousand farms in Cumbria, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland due to the risk of Caesium-137 entering the food chain. In Scotland, those restrictions remained in place until 2010, and in Cumbria until 2012.

Like many of us who grew up during the Cold War, fear of nuclear annihilation is hard-wired into my DNA. In 1979, in the wake of media panic surrounding the NORAD (National Emergency Airborne Command Post) incident, when a computer error simulated a full-scale Soviet nuclear attack, resulting in retaliatory alerts across the US and Europe, I remember asking my father if I would wake up as a skeleton after the bomb was dropped.

This fear has lingered on in my fascination with the story of nuclear power, a technology so mythical in proportion, so ingenious, grotesque (some people call the mushroom cloud beautiful), it’s impossible to turn away. What happened at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima is well known. As well as the atrocities of Nagasaki, Hiroshima, the Marshall Islands. Mistakes that could never be repeated. Right?

In 2005, then Scottish First Minister, Jack McConnell, stated he was not in favour of new nuclear and, in 2007, the newly elected SNP government formalised the no new nuclear strategy; Scotland has maintained that stance ever since. As the Scottish government website clearly states: ‘We oppose the building of new nuclear stations using current technologies. We believe that nuclear power represents poor value for consumers.’ It goes on to argue against the cost of new nuclear developments such as Hinkley Point C which will see ‘consumers subsidising its operation until 2060.’ As for Scotland’s own nuclear stations, Hunterston, Dounreay and Chapelcross are in the process of being decommissioned, and Torness is set to close by 2030.

But with elections coming on 7 May 2026, almost forty years to the day since fallout from Chernobyl first reached our shores, Scotland’s nuclear future is up for debate. In October 2025, twenty years after McConnell instigated the no new nuclear policy, UK Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband, attacked the SNP claiming they are holding back Scotland’s nuclear future with their ‘anti-growth, anti-jobs ban.’

The piece, in New Civil Engineer, shows a marked change in policy, in which Scottish Labour now says, ‘yes to new nuclear in Scotland.’

What has changed? Contrary to Johnson’s slogan, ‘Go nuclear, go large,’ Miliband and Starmer have joined the bandwagon of billionaires who see the future of nuclear energy in small modular reactors (SMRs), sold to the public as a kind of ‘nuclear light,’ or watered down version of the big thing. The IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) classifies an SMR as a nuclear reactor with a power output of up to 300 Mwe, enough to supply 300,000 homes. Full-scale nuclear stations are 1GW or over, powering one million plus homes. The key word is, ‘modular,’ meaning SMR components (theoretically) will be built in factories and assembled on site along the lines of an IKEA flatpack. I say theoretically because the technology is vastly underdeveloped, with only one SMR currently in existence: China’s HTR-PM reactor in Shandong. US and European SMR companies such as NuScale, Terrapower (owned by Bill Gates), and Rolls Royce SMR, despite having received billions of government investment, have yet to come up with a successful and economically viable design. Go Nuclear, Go Nowhere.

Yet, on 13 November 2025, the UK government announced that Wylfa, on the coast of Ynys Môn (Anglesey) in North Wales, will host the country’s first SMR power plant.

In his 2024 book, Nuclear is not the Solution, M V Ramana calls SMRs a ‘diseconomy of scale,’ claiming these projects have failed because the overwhelming financial costs of research, development and construction, and the time scales involved, are simply not viable in terms of the power they produce. A good example is NuScale whose SMR design, after being approved by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and receiving billions in funding from private investors and the US Department of Energy, was cancelled because its estimated cost rose from $4.2 billion in 2018 for a 720-megawatt plant, to ‘an eye-popping $9.3 billion for just 462 megawatts of power capacity’ (M V Ramana).

It would take five NuScale reactors to achieve the same projected output as Hinkley Point C at around the same price tag, yet the SMRs would power only 1.5 million homes, compared with Hinkley’s projected 6 million. That’s without considering decommissioning, an additional cost, not borne by the operators, but by the public. Assuming it all goes without a hitch.

Nevertheless, in Miliband’s new nuclear golden age, there will be ‘a network of small modular reactors across the UK’ providing us all with cheap, safe, clean electricity. It seems that Miliband is living in something akin to a parallel universe. At the very least, it’s an alternative narrative without any real believability.

So where does Scotland fit in? ‘Enlighten,’ Scotland’s ‘Independent Think Tank,’ whose board of trustees is chaired by none other than Jack McConnell, says this on the subject of nuclear power: ‘the current view of the SNP that nuclear is unsafe and too costly collapses under scrutiny,’ because nuclear is, ‘safer on a deaths-per-unit-of-power basis than wind’ and, furthermore, ‘Most of the fatalities associated with nuclear have come not from radiation, but from poorly managed evacuations, such as after Fukushima.’ Without nuclear, says ‘Enlighten,’ Scotland ‘will lose its last source of zero-carbon baseload power… the backup will not be more wind farms or batteries, it will be fossil fuels or imports from Norway.’

Have we been enlightened on the road to Damascus, or is it just radioactive glow? On the subject of evacuations, perhaps Ed and Jack can tell us how fast we should run from nuclear fallout? Oh, they’re gone.

After rummaging through the internet for statistics on deaths per unit of power (yes, someone has actually carried out that fool’s errand) I found: wind power is responsible for 0.04 deaths per TWh (Terawatt hour), nuclear for 0.03, and solar for 0.02. It’s not clear if this figure includes birds flying into turbines. According to Morgan Legal Group PLLC who, if not paragons of virtue, have at least done some research: ‘no central database tracks all accidents caused by wind turbines… of over 200 reported accidents at wind farms in the United States since 2009… most of these accidents result from malfunctioning equipment or human error rather than the wind turbines themselves.’ As for Scotland’s data, unless the Nuckelavee (that Orcadian skinless sea monster who sought revenge on communities for burning seaweed) has now turned its attention to wind farms, I’ll assume it’s not dissimilar.

Of course, McConnell et al. are not the only ones running alternative rings around nuclear fission. The World Nuclear Organisation claims only 28 people died as a direct result of Chernobyl, going so far as to state that the accident records are ‘of little consequence in terms of human fatalities.’ Animal casualties are not included. To be fair, fatalities are difficult to measure due to the challenges of gathering long-term data, but a good indicator is that, in 2019, the Ukrainian government was paying survivors’ benefits to 35,000 families ‘owing to the loss of a breadwinner whose death was deemed to be possibly related to the Chernobyl accident.’ Ukrainian and Belarusian physicians treating large numbers of former liquidators suggested the IAEA had under estimated the toll of disaster-related deaths from long-latency health consequences, claiming the true figure to be around several thousand per year.

Perhaps the sacred cow of alternative realities around new nuclear power is that, without it, we will be unable to keep global warming below 1.5°C, the figure set by the Paris Agreement to achieve net zero emissions. There is no doubt that achieving this target is urgent. Current estimates show we are on course for a modest 2.2°C rise, with 2024 being the warmest year on record. In the UK, this trend continued into 2025.

So how would it work? According to New Civil Engineer, to bridge the shortfall left by large nuclear, forty to fifty SMRs would have to be built in the UK by 2050, an unprecedented annual build rate requiring highly efficient levels of factory-based manufacturing. The components of SMRs are complex and difficult to design and manufacture. Testing and evaluation alone for China’s HTR-PM took 26 months; the entire reactor took ten years to build. Starmer’s promise to use ‘all the tools in our armoury – cutting red tape, changing planning laws, and backing growth – to deliver the country’s first SMR in North Wales,’ cannot downplay the complexity, nor make it go faster.

The same goes for full scale nuclear power. Taishan 1, China’s EPR (European Pressurised Reactor), built on the same model as Hinkley C, took ten years to complete. If Hinkley is operational by 2030, it will have taken twelve years. Given that nuclear engineering is a process which even large centralised power systems cannot fast track, then what hope is there for capitalist systems, with their complicated financing through SPACs (special acquisition companies), mergers and endless requests for government funding, before a result has even been produced.

As a final aside, most SMRs currently in development (including that of Wylfa) are expected to run on a more highly enriched form of uranium 235 known as HALEU (High Assay Low Enriched Uranium). Currently, the only supplier of HALEU is Rosatom, Russia’s state-owned nuclear energy company. This small matter of energy security knocks the ‘imports from Norway’ argument out the park.

My favourite novel, Greenvoe, by Orcadian author and poet, George Mackay Brown, is, in effect, a parallel universe in which a mysterious development called Black Star arrives on Orkney in order to mine uranium, thus destroying millennia of life on the island. Where’s Nuckelavee when you need him?

But before we plunge ourselves into a dystopian future where Ed Miliband clones in trilby hats sell upcycled SMRs in second hand junkyards, it is worth considering how our energy needs are actually being met in present-day reality: 98% of Scotland’s energy comes from renewables. Published statistics show that, ‘in 2024, a record 38.4 TWh of renewable electricity was generated in Scotland… an 8.4% increase on the previous high of 35.5 TWh generated in 2022’ (https://www.gov.scot/publications/energy-statistics-for-scotland-q4-2024/pages/renewable-electricity-generation/). In 2022, renewables actually provided an excess of energy, the equivalent of 113% of Scotland’s electricity needs (https://www.gov.scot/news/record-renewable-energy-output/), with wind providing 78% of all renewable energy (https://www.scottishrenewables.com/our-industry/statistics). Although Scotland imports gas from Norway, oil and gas together account for only 11% of Scotland’s electricity production, with gas often forming only 2.2% (https://electricityproduction.uk/in/scotland/) of the overall mix, and gas consumption continuing to decline. Wind farms do require more land than a nuclear plant, but that land will remain uncontaminated and can still be used for other purposes like agriculture.

Long duration battery storage is frequently cited as a drawback for renewables, the claim being it will lead to power cuts. However, solutions such as compressed air energy storage (CAES), hydrogen storage, and flow batteries, are advancing considerably. In 2022, global grid-scale battery storage capacity saw an over 75% increase in installations, and ‘is expected to rise by 67 per cent to 617GWh this year and to grow tenfold by 2035, according to energy research firm BNEF’ (https://ig.ft.com/mega-batteries/). Large-scale grid modernization programs, such as the UK’s ‘The Great Grid Upgrade,’ to build new high-voltage lines and subsea cables, are underway.

Furthermore, the cost of renewables, including infrastructure and battery storage, has plummeted by around 90% over the past ten years and, according to Bloomberg, the fall is expected to continue. In terms of the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) nuclear is by far the most expensive option at £109 per MWh, four times more expensive than wind which costs only £38 MWh (https://www.gov.scot/publications/foi-202400420100/), making renewables the default lowest-cost option for new power generation worldwide.

While writing this article, the MWh price of electricity in the UK is £72.50 per MWh. The annual strike price for Hinkley Point C (referred to earlier) is £128.09 per MWh (at today’s inflation), and this price is guaranteed for 35 years, adding considerably to the MWh price of electricity for every household in the UK. The deal for Sizewell C is no better. It allows the developers to start charging us for electricity before the plant is even built. The fancy name is Regulated Asset Base (RAB), designed to avoid companies incurring interest on loans during the construction phase. The abandoned V C Summer project in South Carolina was financed on this model, leaving customers paying for electricity they never received to the tune of £1.4 billion. Years later, one of the parties involved, Westinghouse, was in the running to build the proposed SMRs at Wylfa in Wales.

In short, the UK government wants to commit the UK and Scotland to a programme of unproven nuclear technology, that is less safe and that will drastically increase the cost of living, while failing to reduce emissions, and leaving future generations with the problem of decommissioning and toxic waste. All this while cleaner and cheaper forms of renewable energy are readily available, that will not only reduce emissions but create jobs in what is now a rapidly developing, and lucrative, industry.

Which universe would you choose?

The nuclear industry and its political cheerleaders are barking so loudly over tried and tested reality, that I feel it’s important for people to have information with which to contradict them. It’s not a political issue, it’s common sense.

In his final paper, ‘A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation,’ Hawking claimed that parallel universes could be potentially detected in the cosmic microwave background of the Big Bang, making them subject to the laws of physics, rather than just theoretical possibilities. He knew believability was important. Unlike McConnell, Miliband, and their new nuclear golden age.

Imagine a pro-nuclear earth where everything that can go wrong has gone wrong: cyber terrorist attacks on power stations, infrastructure failure, catastrophic environmental disaster caused by the effects of global warming, radiation leaks, core meltdowns, large scale fallout, widespread contamination, mutual nuclear annihilation, an uninhabitable earth.

By the same token, a parallel universe also exists where this will never happen. An earth where people decide against a risky, costly, and unpredictable programme of nuclear technology. Where society puts aside those ideas on the basis that just because you could, doesn’t mean you definitely should. A world where people focus instead on expanding renewables. Where governments, whatever their systems, expend valuable public money on healthcare, education, equality, the restoration of biodiversity…

Does it have to be a parallel universe?

This article is reprinted with permission from the author, Tracy Patrick. She is a a poet and novelist from Paisley, Scotland.

The article was first published on December 8, 2025 on https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2025/12/08/the-parallel-universe-of-small-modular-reactors-smrs/

Sources:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-43976977

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/13/spending-billions-on-unclean-risky-energy-what-a-nuclear-waste

https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/miliband-starts-fight-with-snp-over-deploying-new-nuclear-in-scotland-24-10-2025/

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/uk-selects-wylfa-for-at-least-three-rolls-royce-smrs

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgr82vqdvzo

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/scottish-sheep-farms-finally-free-of-chernobyl-fallout-2020059.html

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-17472931

https://www.enlighten.scot/time-to-ditch-the-nuclear-ban/