Rolls-Royce

So a little bit about Paul, for those of you who don't know him, but I'm sure if you've been in the energy industry in the UK, then you probably know Paul because he's been involved in a lot of some of the critical energy industries and government decisions that have been made over the past few decades.

He started out in a number of industry roles, including Siemens, and then, of course, in a number of roles in Rolls-Royce, very involved as CTO in areas like SMRs and has been involved in a lot of the outcomes of what's happened to Rolls-Royce.

SMR since then.

He's sat on a lot of committees for various parts of the British government.

So some of these things sort of have grown lives of their own, which is great.

I've worked in the defence sector, worked in the Ministry of Defence for a bit, and the nuclear industry.

As you quite rightly said, I span out the small modular reactor programme from Rolls-Royce, but we'll come back to that in a bit.

And I've worked for another big number of big names, Philips and Thales and Siemens and Rolls-Royce and the MOD.

I had to, I had to write a few times.

[laughs] So, uh, we had this revival and, uh, as I, uh, gather, Rolls-Royce was kind of in and out, uh, a couple of times, or at least once in terms of working with them on this propulsion plant.

Yeah.

So Rolls-Royce was involved in the 1980s on HOTOL and, um, and then, and, uh, and then in the 21st century they eventually came back, uh, as an investor intere- as, uh, confidence grew in the tech- Skylon technology that, uh, Reaction Engines had, that, uh, brought in more investors.

Um, BAE Systems became an investor in Reaction Engines.

Um, Rolls-Royce became an investor in, in Reaction Engines.

And these were major turning points in the, in the, uh, in the lifetime of the, of the company.

And, um, the stor- the, my book explains all this, because there were people at Rolls-Royce who were against HOTOL and Skylon and SABRE.

We would be much wiser, perhaps, to transition to clean energy in other ways.

So instead of those 144 wind turbines and the threat to human environment, to marine ecology, we use just four SMRs industrialized as we are aware of one of many potential examples the Rolls-Royce modular industrialized construction and I'll come to that later and we look at the imprint of that SMR, we compare it with a built solar farm, and we look at it in terms of its imprint on the landscape of that wind turbine.

And if we think about the virtues of nuclear, then that tiny imprint, which delivers a relative vast amount of power is totally carbon-free.

It's also, nobody has died from nuclear waste, and yet every year these kind of emissions from fossil kill between 7 and 10 million people every year, many of them children dying from waste, fossil fuels which are burnt for heating and cooling.

So grab a cup of tea because today we are going to the UK and talking all things nuclear development in the UK.

When you think Rolls-Royce, You're probably picturing luxury cars, not nuclear reactors, but they are in fact building Europe's first SMR in Wales.

And that's just the beginning.

The UK also just secured funding for Sizewell C, a massive gigawatt scale reactor that will bring energy and economic opportunity to the grid and the communities around it.

Yeah.

People are going to be so surprised by that.

Rolls-Royce is building Europe's first small modular reactor in Wales.

It is.