(I wrote this piece a week or so ago, meant to do a bit more work but haven’t got around to it. Hence slightly dated allusions)
The culmination of Donald Trump’s state visit to the UK was a press conference at which both American and British leaders waved pieces of paper, containing an agreement that US firms would invest billions of dollars in Britain.
The symbolism was appropriate, since a central element of the proposed investment bonanza was the construction of large numbers of nuclear reactors, of a kind which can appropriately be described as “paper reactors”.
The term was coined by US Admiral Hyman Rickover, who directed the original development of nuclear powered submarines.
Rickover described their characteristics as follows:
- It is simple.
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It is small.
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It is cheap.
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It is light.
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It can be built very quickly.
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It is very flexible in purpose (“omnibus reactor”)
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Very little development is required. It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components.
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The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.
But these characteristics were needed by Starmer and Trump, whose goal was precisely to have a piece of paper to wave at their meeting.
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