Powered Nuclear
Our Reaction to Fingleton’s Independent Review of Nuclear Regulation
For the past five years, the UK has been talking confidently about a “renaissance” in nuclear power.
But in 2025, the gap between ambition and delivery has become impossible to ignore, especially for novel nuclear technologies such as small modular reactors (SMRs), advanced modular reactors (AMRs), and nuclear fusion.
Today, John Fingleton’s Independent Review of Nuclear Regulation was published, placing a rocket booster under the agenda. If the Government is serious about nuclear as a critical tool in accelerating abundant, cheap, green electrons across the UK, it should deliver the report’s recommendations in full.
The UK’s Bet on Novel Nuclear
The UK government’s strategy is unambiguous: nuclear is central to net zero and energy security.
Before the General Election last year, Rishi Sunak’s Government published a Civil Nuclear Roadmap, which set out a plan to increase capacity to up to 24 GW by 2050, with a rolling programme of 3-7 GW added every five years.
This isn’t achievable with large pressurised water reactors alone; the strategy explicitly hinges on SMRs and AMRs, which promise lower upfront costs, modular manufacturing, and industrial heat applications.
To make this real, ministers have backed the sector with major capital commitments:
Over £2.5bn for Rolls-Royce SMRs, selected in June 2025 as the UK’s preferred partner for the technology.
A new SMR siting programme led by Great British Energy-Nuclear, with Wylfa in Wales named as the first location, alongside one of the new AI Growth Zones.
Up to £385m for advanced nuclear through the Advanced Nuclear Fund, including AMR demonstrations and high-temperature gas reactor development.
A sizable nuclear fusion push, committing over £400m to maintain momentum behind the West Burton STEP prototype and the fusion cluster at Culham.
Finally, the Government has published EN-7, the UK’s new National Policy Statement for Nuclear Energy Generation, replacing the older EN-6 and providing the planning framework for approving new nuclear projects under the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIP) regime.
EN-7 introduces a criteria-based, technology-agnostic approach designed to accommodate modern nuclear technologies such as SMRs and AMRs. It broadens the range of potentially suitable sites, updates environmental and technical assessment requirements, and clarifies how nuclear projects will be evaluated against national needs for energy security and net-zero.
The ambition is enormous; the question is whether the regulatory foundation can carry it.
Atomic Technology meets Stone Age Regulation
To date, the UK’s nuclear regulatory architecture has been strong but slow. Its core elements are:
The Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR): independent, safety-critical, and respected internationally.
The Environment Agency and devolved regulators, handling radioactive substances and environmental permitting.
The NSIP planning regime, which treats nuclear projects as nationally significant infrastructure requiring Development Consent Orders.
The Generic Design Assessment (GDA), an exhaustive multi-year process to review new reactor technologies.
This framework was designed for one-off, custom-built sites like Hinkley Point C, not for factory-built modular reactors deployed as fleets, or for increasingly internationalised supply chains where early regulatory work may be done overseas.
The result is predictable: even with goodwill on all sides, novel nuclear developers face a thicket of overlapping processes, uncertain timelines, and regulatory costs that clash with the promise of modularity.
Government knows this, and admits it openly. And rather than tinkering, it created the most sweeping review possible.
Enter John Fingleton
In April 2025, the Prime Minister appointed John Fingleton, former head of the Office of Fair Trading and a major voice in regulatory reform, to lead a Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce. Its remit is strikingly broad:
Review all regulations affecting civil and defence nuclear - safety, planning, environment, siting - and recommend changes to support timely, cost-effective delivery of the UK’s nuclear goals.
The Taskforce reports not just to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, but also to the Defence Secretary and HM Treasury, signalling that this is seen as an industrial-strategic issue, not just an energy one.
Today the final report was announced, and the renaissance could be in sight.
A Radical Reset
Fingleton has found that overly complex regulation in the UK has contributed to the “relative decline” in the UK’s global leadership position in nuclear. To remedy this, the Report calls for a “Radical Reset”, through 47 recommendations, including:
Stronger political leadership, including the government providing a robust strategic direction for the civil and defence nuclear sectors.
Establishing a Commission for Nuclear Regulation to be a unified decision maker across all regulators, planners, and approval bodies.
Clarifying risk tolerability and proportionality, bringing Britain into line with the rest of the world.
Merging the Defence Nuclear Safety Regulator into the Office for Nuclear Regulation.
Avoiding regulation which prioritises bureaucracy over safe outcomes, such as reforming environmental and planning regimes to enhance nature and deliver projects quicker.
Why We Care, and Why This is Good
Startup Coalition believes that a low carbon, low cost grid is critical to the future success of our startup ecosystem.
Abundant, green electrons require supply from all low-carbon sources, including SMRs and AMRs. This is made all the more important by the UK’s compute ambitions, on which AI-enabled startups depend.
As we stated in our November 2025 Hard to Compute report:
“Across every element of Clean Power 2030, data centres must be viewed as a catalyst, in terms of reliable, high, and sustained demand for green electrons.”
Co-location of data centres with SMRs, as we are seeing at Wylfa, is a sensible path to scaling both compute and low carbon energy supply.
But beyond novel nuclear as a core part of low-carbon infrastructure, we care about this because there are too few novel nuclear founders in the UK today.
The UK was the first country to split the atom, commission the first full-scale nuclear power station supplying energy to a grid, and by 1965 had more nuclear reactors in operation than the US, USSR, and France put together.
Today, we have fallen far from the frontier that we once occupied, but today’s announcement can be a core part of turning this around.
If implemented, the recommendations in Fingleton’s report lay the foundations for the next generation of nuclear technologies to be built in the UK, this is good news for everyone.