Rolls-Royce and Cavendish Nuclear have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to explore opportunities to deepen the relationship between the parties through cooperation on the Rolls-Royce SMR programme.

Under this agreement Rolls-Royce and Cavendish Nuclear commit to working together to develop the roles that Cavendish Nuclear can perform in the design, licensing, manufacturing and delivery aspects of the Rolls-Royce factory-fabricated small modular nuclear power plant.

Among the opportunities to explore will be Cavendish Nuclear’s capabilities in engineering design; validation and verification; and the provision of manufacturing facilities and capability for aspects of the SMR plant manufacture.  This will involve exercising the broad set of technical and manufacturing capabilities and facilities that UK-owned Cavendish Nuclear has within its portfolio.

The agreement has been signed by Rolls-Royce in its role as consortium leader on the program that has been working on the design of the power station for the last two years with support from the UK Government through UK Research and Innovation. The consortium already includes many well-established UK nuclear industry brands including Assystem, Atkins, BAM Nuttall, Laing O’Rourke, National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL), Rolls-Royce, Jacobs, The Welding Institute (TWI) and Nuclear AMRC.

The MoU with Cavendish Nuclear brings additional capabilities to the UK SMR program and adds world class manufacturing and design capabilities to strengthen and complement those already within the current supply chain partners.  

The Rolls-Royce SMR, a single unit of which can power one million* homes, is a radically different approach to delivering new nuclear power and takes advantage of factory built modularisation techniques to drastically reduce the amount of on-site construction and can deliver a low cost nuclear solution that is competitive with renewable alternatives. 

The Rolls-Royce SMR will provide long term, guaranteed, low carbon power to support both on-grid electricity as well as a range of off-grid clean energy solutions to support the decarbonisation of industry and the production of clean fuels to support the energy transition in the wider heat and transportation sectors.