Meeting of the Parliament 24 June 2026 [Draft]
Absolutely. Inevitably, existing nuclear reactors will have to be decommissioned. That is an important part of the sector. However, we need to look at how to succeed in generating capacity in Scotland. The refusal to consider a small modular reactor at Grangemouth to power the complex, for example, left our petrochemical industry vulnerable to soaring energy costs.
The fallout of that extends far beyond energy-intensive industrial sectors such as Grangemouth; it hits communities in Ayrshire and East Lothian, where the high-quality, well-paid jobs provided by Hunterston and Torness are under threat. When we turn our backs on the nuclear sector, we tell our brightest science, technology, engineering and mathematics graduates, engineers, physicists and technicians that their future lies not here but overseas or south of the border; we bleed the very talent that we desperately need to build the clean industries of tomorrow.
The solution does not lie in overengineered and, frankly, obsolete designs of the past. I believe in the United Kingdom’s own Rolls-Royce small modular reactor technology, which is available today. Those reactors are roughly one third of the size of the current fleet and offer a revolutionary path forward to have more flexible load-following baseload capacity. We can repower the existing advanced gas-cooled reactor sites at Hunterston and Torness by capitalising on their established grid connections and vital cooling water infrastructure. Those SMRs are built in factories, modularly assembled and transported to sites, which drastically reduces the crippling construction delays that have plagued megaprojects such as Hinkley Point C.
That is not a hypothetical future. A European nuclear race is already under way, and Scotland is currently watching from the sidelines. Just this month, Rolls-Royce SMR secured a landmark multibillion contract to build three nuclear reactors in Sweden, following its selection by GB Energy as the preferred technology partner. Let us consider the huge scale of that untapped potential on our doorstep; we also have the capacity to build the heavy-pressure vessel fabrication and advanced modular assemblies that are needed for those reactors at the Rosyth and Govan shipyards.
If the Government dropped the ideological ban, there could be opportunities for export across the entire continent. Instead of merely exporting electricity, we could be supporting the engineering.
The ambition is written into our history. We can see it across Scotland. It is time to abandon the sunk-cost fallacy, which keeps the Government tethered to outdated dogma. Let us honour the legacy of electrical engineering in the country and integrate a modern nuclear baseload with our renewable wealth, which would unleash the industrial might of our shipbuilding capacity. We could secure an industrial future and provide clean, reliable power for generations to come.