Growing our nuclear industry

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced plans to unlock 200+ acres of land at Moorside in West Cumbria for new nuclear power generation, following my year long campaign and as laid out in my industrial plan for West Cumbria.

The Prime Minister confirmed that land at Moorside will be freed up to be leased and marketed by a local development corporation to pave the way for a new nuclear power plant. This ‘Pioneer Park’ will seek to attract Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) and the energy intensive industry they could power.

Read the coverage in the Whitehaven News

Unlocking land at Moorside has been the biggest barrier to securing new nuclear power generation in West Cumbria since the collapse of the NuGen deal in 2018. West Cumbria later lost out on the STEP Fusion programme and a plan for a £6 billion private nuclear development of SMRs was blocked in 2023 by the then Conservative government because of competing demands on the use of the land, as evidenced in The Moorside Letters.

I set up the Cumberland Nuclear Future Board last year with my fellow Cumberland MPs, Cllr Mark Fryer, the leader of Cumberland Council, the leaders of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority and Sellafield Ltd and local union and business representatives to try to remove the roadblocks that had built up under the Conservatives to delivering new nuclear in West Cumbria.

Multiple meetings have been held with Ministers to try to resolve the issues with use of and access to the land. Agreement has now been reached and work is underway to make the land available. A market engagement process with nuclear and other clean energy developers will be launched this summer.

While this doesn’t guarantee that we’ll get new nuclear in West Cumbria, it gives us the best possible shot we’ve had since 2018. We now have the chance to seize control of our own destiny. This really is a game changer for our area.

Following the announcement I asked the Energy Secretary to continue working with us to make it a reality and to speed up the regulatory process so we can build new nuclear faster.

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