UK prime minister at Hinkley. Crown copyright/Flickr. Some rights reserved.In his Comprehensive Spending Review, chancellor George Osborne doubled research support for new, smaller nuclear reactors, as he justified slashing taxpayer support for solar and wind generation.
Last month, China’s president Xi Jinping was feted in a state visit, including a banquet with Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace and a meeting at 10 Downing Street with prime minister David Cameron. This came as part of finalizing a major industrial partnership deal, which involved several deals on inward nuclear investment in the UK, including a £6 billion investment (about a third of the project cost) in EDF Energy’s 3.2GW Hinkley C nuclear plant, by the Chinese state-owned China General Nuclear Power Corporation.
Meanwhile, on the other side of London, over 130 nuclear company representatives, R&D specialists and innovators, along with key policy players, met in the shadow of The Tower of London for Nuclear Energy Insider’s two-day Small Modular Reactor (SMR) UK summit.
