SMRs pose a challenge to conventional security practices – and could change the way we think about policing.
Moving fast and breaking things is a hubristic engineering approach from Silicon Valley. Shattering moulds and conventions – especially cherished assumptions – seems to be the political as well as the technological mood.
Many governments (31 and climbing) are moving unusually fast towards a nuclear energy renaissance, towards a world where towns are powered by their own local reactors. Deadlocks and dams that add huge cost and delay to nuclear builds will be broken by a new planning and regulatory regime, accelerating design, production and proliferation.
In this fast and fragmented future, data centres, mines and even commercial ships will be running on micro-reactors, and there are even some distant noises about nuclear batteries.
From the perspective of climate targets and secure energy supplies, a global tilt to a dynamic scenario – where low cost, quick build, emission-free reactors are the preferred solution – makes sense. Improvements in design, safety, manufacturability and affordability make "the nuclear option" more attractive to build, operate and maintain than in previous eras.
However, if they are to succeed, these fast-bred community-based solutions must bring with them a comprehensive, integrated multi-disciplinary response to the rapidly evolving policing realities.
Global solutions
Smaller nuclear reactors are attracting excitement and investment. With few viable alternatives to meet climate targets, at least 80 Small Modular Reactors (SMR) are already being developed in 19 countries according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Encouraged by reduced red tape and increased financial incentives, energy companies with nuclear credentials are talking to European governments revisiting their nuclear strategies, while novice nations with no history of nuclear power are preparing to exploit the next iteration of a once-controversial solution. This activity is well documented – a rudimentary browser search of "SMR" will reveal both the enthusiasm that these proposed power plants have generated and the alacrity with which they are being pursued.
Local realities,
Support from the community in which it will be built and operated will be critical to the life cycle success of any new nuclear facility in a range of ways including workforce supply, educational and scientific research, communication and engagement. As argued in paper (Sampson/McNeill 13/1/25), to be introduced successfully into a UK neighbourhood an SMR will need to be supported by local policing and resilience partnerships. In other words, policing and resilience partners will need to move fast and break things too.
The acid test for whether an SMR can be safely and securely introduced into UK communities will not be a matter of nuclear engineering or design innovation. It will be the extent to which local police chiefs can assure their communities that they can confidently accommodate such reactors. Before giving that assurance, local policing leaders – including directly elected mayors and police and crime commissioners – will need to consider many factors, some of which will require fundamental reconstruction of the policing arrangements for which they are accountable.
Policing design
The design of policing in England and Wales does not have much synergy: national response capability is essentially the sum of its parts. And some of those parts are missing, as HM Chief Inspector of Constabulary (HMIC) noted nearly 20 years ago.
HMIC recommended breaking with conventions and shattering old geographical structures to close the gaps in critical national capabilities but they were never actioned. Since 2012 directly-elected local policing bodies set the budgets and priorities for their 43 police areas. Those locally-elected leaders have been chosen by their communities through the democratic process to ensure that the views of local people are reflected in policing activity. Community reaction to proposed sites, the national expectations and expense will therefore be of existential importance to them.
Community fallout from proposed energy solutions is not new for policing (as anyone visiting villages affected by the 1984 miners' strike will discover to this day). For a more recent example, look at Kirkby Misperton, North Yorkshire (population 370). In October 2016, the government's announcement that the village was to be a fracking site to assess the viability of shale oil reserves required an immediate police presence. A year later the police were still there at an additional local cost to North Yorkshire communities of £101,476, not including the impact of the site on 'routine' community policing.
In neighbouring Lancashire, the additional cost of policing for fracking opposition was an estimated £11.5m which the UK government had to underwrite. In addition to the financial cost, the fracking experience brought other demands for local police resources including the need for specialist officers to deal with protestors in trees and a steep increase in complaints against officers, each of which had to be properly investigated. Policing leaders will be acutely aware of these effects, from far less ambitious energy policies, on their communities. However, before they can assure their communities that they can confidently accommodate nuclear reactors, police chiefs will need to stress test the realities of the UK's policing model, moving fast and, if necessary, breaking with tradition.
Policing expectations
The internationally recognised principles for nuclear site security are "deter, detect, delay and respond". The first two are common to policing but the third and fourth will not fit with current local and national capabilities in the UK if the proliferation of small nuclear sites goes ahead.
Taking the 'delay' principle, it is questionable whether time will always be on the side of the local police and their communities managing a site-based incursion. A protracted standoff with attendant international news coverage (there is no such thing as a local nuclear policing incident) and speculation, along with disinformation driving fears of environmental contamination will have a seismic impact on communities. Delay may also give occupiers space to work out a way of converting material into a dirty bomb, or malignant posts claiming to have done so; for serious public disorder and for copycat incidents to spread virally.
In relation to the fourth principle, 'respond', international experts have explained that this means "more SWAT team type people who, if a threat is detected, come charging out". In UK policing, first responders will be local, invariably unarmed, police. Under current nuclear policing arrangements, the specific burden of mitigating sitebased threats rests with the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC), a small body of around 1,060 permanently armed police officers, funded by the nuclear operating companies.
The CNC model was configured in 2005 for immediate defence of ten large licensed nuclear sites across the UK. If the international response expectation is further armed 'SWAT team type people' it is unclear who these people might be, where they would be coming from, how and when they will get there and what they were being paid to do when not charging out to local nuclear sites. Equally unclear is the community impact of seeing such a display of brigaded lethal force hurtling to a site they were assured was safely covered.
For UK policing, these are not hypothetical or speculative questions; they are the same questions that were asked (and never properly answered) when the National Police Air Service (NPAS) was established in 2012. The national model for policing the UK depends on calling up local support on a 'mutual aid' basis. Ministers have the power to mandate collaborative contribution to the national effort but NPAS is the first and only time it has been used. Directing police chiefs to share and pay for air support encountered significant resistance, with the national strategic board being locked in an almost perpetual review of costing and deployment models struggling to balance fairness, effectiveness and affordability across differing demand profiles. Compared to the demand challenges of SMRs, managing a small fleet of airframes should be a walk on the beat.
UK Counter-Terrorism policing has a sub-division dedicated to Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) threats, but this too relies on local policing contribution for training, equipment and secondment of staff and was built for an entirely different threat, risk and harm landscape than that which SMR would bring. In distinction to policing models such as the Gendarmerie in France, UK policing has not been designed for these national challenges and, to adopt a sporting metaphor, will need to break the 'club versus country' dilemma at the very earliest point of SMR planning.
And of course, there are many risks that cannot be swatted away. No affordable national reserve capability would be effective against insider threats, cyber attacks, aerial assault and the risk of simultaneous multiple attacks.
One expert assessment has questioned whether the previous 'habits of nuclear appraisal optimism' were a thing of the past, pointing out that 'the smaller scale of SMRs means that associated risks are more widely distributed and more difficult to defend against.' A proliferation of small nuclear plants across semi-urban communities facing attack vectors unknown in the last era would quickly overwhelm both specialist and general policing resources under our current structure for one obvious reason: it is the solution to a different problem.
New risk architecture
In many ways, the new nuclear world is not really a renaissance; some key features are very different from our first foray into nuclear energy. We have not moved at this speed before, we have not had multi-site proliferation before and we have not had the technological capability for disruption, disinformation and cyber attacks before. The risk architecture and attack vectors for the next generation of nuclear reactors will be very different from the ones we faced in the last era of civil nuclear power. For example, social media has turbocharged the citizen's ability to create substantial disruption from anywhere on Earth, a capability unimagined by the Magnox generation and their military equivalents at Greenham Common.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are an interesting example of a new risk that we are struggling to address in a non-nuclear setting. While little was said or done about risks from drones to large, geographically remote nuclear facilities (an ongoing concern at Zaporizhzhia and Chornobyl), there is abundant evidence of the problems countering UAV activity around sensitive installations. If we cannot stop drones from delivering drugs and laptops to local prisons with perimeter defences, strict access controls and a mature intelligence infrastructure, why would we believe we will be any more successful with small nuclear sites without a substantially different approach?
Additional new site risks include sabotage during the planning and construction life cycle and continuing insider threats against the challenge of providing effective vetting and security clearance for an exponentially enlarged workforce operating at speed. Non-site specific risks include deepfakes and cyber-enabled crime, deliberate and concerted disruption of communications, supply chains, transport of materials, dis/misinformation and, perhaps most of all, technological complacency.
New costing model
While lower project costs of SMRs are one of their attractions, life cycle disruption will still have enormous commercial consequences. Although smaller, construction sites will have fixed daily costs based on thousands of people working and the utilisation of specialist equipment. At the same time, every year of construction delay jeopardises inbound cash flow for the project owner taking all the investment risk. That will impact on the policing costs which, under current rules, must be agreed in advance within a 'police services agreement' between the operator and the local police force. With the litigation still ringing in the ears of police chiefs that have football stadiums to police, and the experience of providing cover to local airports under the National Aviation Security Plan, the funding mechanism underpinning additional policing expectations is the very opposite of moving fast and the traditional impasse it creates will need to be broken.
Re-engineering policing
If we are to move fast and break the things impeding progress, then policing needs to be part of the re-engineering. The threat, risk and harm profile for SMRs, together with operational policing imperatives, reach far beyond the UK and, irrespective of jurisdictional differences, affect every country that identifies SMR as a solution to its climate change obligations.
To accommodate the global energy ambitions, policing needs to be redesigned for functionality, reliability and sustainability; it needs finite element analysis (FEA) of the whole and optimisation of its component parts including who pays and how; and it needs computer aided design (CAD) in the form of augmented reality tools, design visualisation, dynamic risk matrices and prototype testing.
In the new nuclear world, effective and affordable policing needs to be supported by, and delivered through systems specifically designed for the environment in which it is expected to function. Within those systems, the sharing and addressing of risks and potential solutions within applicable constraints will be critical. The timely provision of information – public and confidential – may be as important as physical infrastructure, requiring international communication and learning systems using multidisciplinary design analysis and optimization to support interactive public engagement. And there is an immediate need for formal research and development partnerships between established research bodies such as CENTRIC with the relevant experience and expertise in infrastructure policing and national security.
Conclusion
Moving fast, the UK Government will shortly announce the two approved contractors for the first tranche of SMRs: the local infrastructure issues they present will be as different as from the large nuclear plants we grew up with as the buildings and sites themselves. Meanwhile, local blue light services are already stretched in matching resources to calls for service and, as they currently stand, the local and national policing arrangements will not be able to keep up.
Global nuclear safety and security arrangements are mature, comprehensive and so far have proved reassuringly resilient. International bodies like the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency help countries develop their security arrangements through international co-operation, while national regulators like the UK Office for Nuclear Regulation have a strong record in protecting communities by securing safe nuclear operations.
A new nuclear world of 'smaller and many' must move fast and must be supported by a new approach to local threat, risk and harm assessment. Facing a range of new risks, from attacks by hostile states and their proxies, the weaponizing of nuclear energy infrastructure to concerted attacks by a complex mix of motivations; from political interference to ransomware plots to 'hot headed coders', local and national policing must be sighted on, and adequately prepared for a new risk matrix. An unrefined response framework designed decades ago for a rare and isolated incident occurring on a large and remote site will be hopelessly unsuited to the world of local nuclear multiples. If unchanged, it will become a casualty of this dynamism and that should perhaps be the primary risks in the strategic energy assessment for introducing SMRs in the UK.
In the new nuclear future, the sooner the contribution expected from policing is brought into the international security framework, the better the prospects of ensuring 'a safe, environmentally sound and economical use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes'.