TBH I share your skepticism on Sizewell but it would be a major controversy if it didn't, especially now China has been paid off

EPRs at either Wylfa/Oldbury (April 2022 announcement) plus some as yet unrealised plans from 2021 to build a hybrid wind farm / Nuscale SMRs that is meant to be for generating hydrogen.

Govt policy here is aiming at around 20-25% nuclear by around the mid 2030s. Three off 3.2GW EPR sites (one under construction, one agreed, one contended) plus one existing AGR.

They are supporting a Rolls Royce version of the SMR in this article but there isn't a policy that includes their use in generation yet given they aren't being built and aren't approved. But I can't see a scenario where SMRs won't come in useful for net zero if we can crack it.

We're building more solar & gas at pace here - a good thing but over here it'll barely keep up with the ageing out nuclear stations & the woodchip burners going offline by 2028. All those storage things are nearly as far out in adoption as SMRs and we're really going to need them as well as the planned 10GW nuclear.

Mostly, the storage will be able to last hours, maybe days, the HVDC between nations smooths things out. But when that Black Swan weather event happens & blankets most of Europe in a high pressure bubble that kills off the wind for 2 weeks... Not many answers with what we'll have around 2030.

E.g. Lithium batteries are great as instantaneous peakers & grid frequency stability for a few hours - but lower tech solutions like flow batteries are more suited to stationary applications, especially as lithium production hits a pinch point where it's really wanted for Gigafactories for electric vehicles above all else - and transport will pay more.

🇬🇧 last 12 months. We certainly have more wind & solar to harness. A record 21GW just last month followed by a period where it wasn't windy & we only got 0.7GW out of it.

41% gas underpins this. And we've all (Europe) been walloped by the price fluctuations caused by the geopolitical antics of producers of said gas jacking up the price this side of the pond. Gas is not an energy security friendly fuel. And it still heats a large percentage of homes here.

We're building HVDC interconnects for all we're worth. Hydro & geothermal isn't really a thing here and hydro is mostly built out. Our wood pellet burners (6.5% total 12mths) are disallowed past 2028 so we don't chip up North American virgin forests to supply them.

Nuclear plants provided >16% electricity but each year fewer plants will be around so that has dropped from 9GW to 5GW in a few short years. It ain't cheap but it is secure so policy is aiming at around 10GW by 2035 to assist net zero. SMRs might help buy us 50 years or so while we work out the harder problems intermittent sources bring

Only the military & govt experimental reactors are allowed to use High Enriched Uranium. SMRs have to use Low Enriched like any other civilian reactor.

In terms of the JWST instruments? Not actually that long, maybe 15 years? JWST was already on the "drawing board" when Hubble was launched. The decades between JWST & Hubble were mostly working out the proving of the engineering origami i.e. folding it up into a rocket fairing, surviving the launch vibration of the solid rocket boosters, then unfurling successfully after parting company from the launch vehicle. The mirror on JWST gives a huge advantage in speed of observation, so tens of days for Hubble to collect light is now half a day & the things it can resolve are a fair bit better (witness the observations of planets in the solar system for example, or the Ultra Deep Field).

But mostly it operates in a different part of the spectrum, which is a game changer when comparing what JWST can reveal when looking at the same area of the sky as Hubble did.

Chris Pattison put one together with Hubble, near IR & mid-IR back to back

Whilst some up quarks might help the situation, you might end up with a hadron & that's probably frowned on in public

Go collect a couple of teaspoons of it et voila - reconstituted quarks for everyone!

Sooo - down quarks then? You need to hang out with some gluons...

China basically decided to get going on offshore wind in 2021 and overtook the whole world's installed capacity in a year

There aren't all that many places where offshore wind in its current form can be placed as it needs shallow seas - hence the North & Irish Seas dominating installed capacity to date.

USA is looking to go big on floating wind farms which could put them in a race with China for installed capacity in coming years.