National Security, Local Jeopardy

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Introduction

The national security of the UK’s nuclear power programme could scarcely be more important. This became clearer than ever in 2024, as the country’s energy sector bore the brunt of cyberattacks in Europe and its vulnerability to sabotage by nation states drove a change in priorities at MI5.

As one of 31 signatories to the Declaration to Triple Nuclear Energy, the UK plans to refocus its energy strategy on the swift construction of small modular reactors (SMRs) in populated areas by 2050, moving away from large nuclear plants in locations that are geographically and societally remote. Internationally, a proliferation of fast-built reactors seems increasingly important to the success of the world’s climate and energy ambitions. The international safety and security implications of this shift in global policy (such as its radiological impact and effects on energy supply) are well documented, but it will present an existential challenge for local policing and resilience partnerships in the UK. If left unaddressed, these issues may well prevent the country from fulfilling its energy ambitions.

The UK’s strategic policing capability

The UK’s critical national infrastructure has historically fallen under the geographic model of local policing, covered by a network of arrangements that involve national policing bodies such as the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC) and the British Transport Police. Writing in 2007 from a vantage point within the nascent Civil Nuclear Police Authority, we illustrated the strategic challenges for local policing against a backdrop of necessary reform proposed by HM Chief Inspector of Constabulary and a lack of focus on national strategic capability. Since then, the ways in which we live and power our lives have changed beyond recognition. The use of social media to organise and inform ourselves is just one area in which our interactions with technology have fundamentally altered the surveillance relationship between citizens and the police, inviting blowback from geopolitical risks into our homes.

In contrast, little has changed in strategic policing since 2007. The HM Chief Inspector’s recommendations for structural reform to address critical national capabilities have not been implemented, and (with the exception of Scotland) the strategic policing landscape has lain undisturbed. National capability continues to rely heavily on local resourcing and the expertise provided by mutual aid and regional collaboration.

In 2012, the local focus in England and Wales tightened further with the creation of elected local policing bodies to set budgets and priorities for their areas. The Strategic Policing Requirement was supposed to balance local priorities and neighbourhood-level performance measures against the maintenance of aggregated national capability. Yet it is a somewhat awkward instrument that the home secretary uses to designate nationwide threats – requiring collaborative efforts by the 43 geographic police forces, beyond the local priorities set by mayors and police and crime commissioners. The Strategic Policing Requirement is an expanding document that now stretches across a complex range of vital policing priorities, from terrorism and serious organised crime to child sexual abuse and violence against women and girls.

While UK Counter Terrorism Policing has a subdivision dedicated to chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats, this capability was built for a landscape entirely different to that created by SMRs – as was its accompanying local policing contribution in terms of training, equipment and the secondment of staff. Since 2005, the specific burden of mitigating site-based threats within the civil nuclear arena rests on the CNC. Deliberately weighted towards a body of permanently armed professional police officers, the CNC is funded by nuclear operating companies and directly reflects the threat assessment. The CNC model is predominantly defensive and geo-configured for a small number of large licensed nuclear sites, along with the occasional international transport of nuclear materials.

Any significant change in the UK’s nuclear energy strategy (such as that involving SMRs) will require a corresponding change in these arrangements. There will need to be a reconfiguration of local and national policing as the UK energy sector brings the planning, design, construction and maintenance of what some headlines have dubbed “mini-nukes” into neighbourhoods. This is because the current model rests on what will soon be outdated assumptions about large, remote sites requiring a small specialist armed police force funded by nuclear operating companies.

The accelerated introduction of nuclear reactors into UK towns resurrects old questions about strategic capability and capacity, and the accountability and resilience of local policing – questions that we raised nearly two decades ago. Gavin Stephenson, chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, said at the organisation’s most recent conference that policing needs fundamental reform if it is to keep up with changes in society and technology. The global shift in nuclear energy strategy and its impact on local policing provides trial-halting testimony as to where and why he is right.

Introducing SMRs: The nuclear option

With few alternatives to meet climate change targets and reduce fossil-fuel dependency, there is significant international movement away from large, expensive and geographically remote nuclear power facilities, and towards much smaller reactors located in populated areas. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) estimates that more than 80 SMRs are already under development in 19 countries.

The UK Government’s strategy was set out by the previous administration, whose Road Map envisages a four-fold increase in nuclear power. In the coming months, ministers will announce the two approved contractors for the first tranche of SMRs; currently, the Government is considering four potential providers for the UK’s next generation of nuclear power plants.

The renaissance of civil nuclear power is remarkable for not only the scale and pace of developments but also the effort to reframe the supporting narrative and enhance its political and commercial appeal. The drivers of this include environmental factors, the international security of energy supplies (in light of Russia’s war on Ukraine) and expansionist corporate interests (given the energy-hungry demands of data centres and AI systems). As a consequence, first-generation nuclear countries share the goal of replacing ageing nuclear plants with SMRs that cost less, are quicker to build and have a footprint small enough to place them in a variety of semi-urban sites.

In demand globally, regulated internationally and delivered locally, the introduction of SMRs needs more than just engineering; it also needs public confidence. The Nuclear Industry Association recognises that the SMRs will only realise their potential if they are safe, secure and free of their current “scariness.” Thus far, safety, security and trust have been regarded as a matter of international engineering and supra-strategic arrangements for safeguarding energy supply. In that respect, design and engineering considerations appear to be manageable risks for many advocates of SMRs and there is a superstructure of tiered, mature regulatory oversight in place at the international, national and local levels.

Each SMR will be located in someone’s neighbourhood policing area. It will be challenging to secure planning permission at a pace necessary to sustain commercial investment and integrated security risk management. There is likely to be growing local, national and international opposition to nuclear energy. As shown by the UK’s experience with windfarms (a far less intimidating technology), there will be significant risk and resource considerations in ensuring that communities feel fully and meaningfully included in planning and preparation, given the difficulties linked to communication and disinformation that could arise. Local emergency responders and incident management units will have a critical role in securing and maintaining public support.

The effort to safely and securely house an SMR in any area of the UK will not just be a matter of design and international agreement; it will also depend on the preparedness and support of local policing and resilience partnerships. The acid test for this will be whether local police chiefs can assure their communities today that they could confidently accommodate an SMR tomorrow. And that remains unclear – for the following reasons.

Policing SMRs: The unclear option

There is no such thing as a ‘local’ nuclear policing incident; patrol matters arising in Cumbria can have immediate resonance in Rajasthan, Flamanville and Tennessee – a fact that underscores the direct link between neighbourhood-level policing and international assurance. The UK’s international nuclear strategy 2.0 should account for a local policing capability suited to threats in the environment in which SMRs will be built and operated. In addressing the issue of confidence discussed above, the police will need to reflect on how the risk architecture and attack vectors of SMRs are wholly different from those faced by the first generation of nuclear power plants, and how to adapt policing arrangements to a new generation. Due to everything from deepfakes and cyberattacks to drone attacks, the infrastructure vulnerabilities of SMRs will be as different to those of Torness as Gen Z protestors on social media are to their placard-waving forebears at Chapelcross.

The biggest threats to the new atomic world order come from selective attacks by hostile states and their proxies. These could involve, for example, the weaponisation of civil energy infrastructure, in which civil sites are sabotaged as sources of extreme risk (the ‘Zaporizhzhia effect’ and nuclear piracy). There is also a threat from deliberate domestic attacks – physical or digital – by non-state actors and individuals with a range of malign motivations. Meanwhile, a combination of intended or inadvertent incidents would be likely to overwhelm specialist CNC and local policing units. Additional risks to SMRs include (but are not restricted to): the sabotage of sites during the planning and construction life cycle; insider threats; cyber-based insider threats (and the considerable difficulty of vetting and providing security clearance for an exponentially enlarged workforce operating at speed); supply chain disruption and capture; interference with mobile devices; misinformation and disinformation; and environmental changes such as flooding.

One can expect new threats to existing civil nuclear sites to expand in range and complexity as countries across the world roll out SMRs. These alone will complicate the responses of nuclear operating companies, the Office for Nuclear Regulation, the CNC and local policing bodies. Then there is the potential risk to the confidence of those communities already inured to living near nuclear reactors.

The UK Government’s Road Map recognises the military and national security aspects of the international security requirements experts have highlighted, as reflected in the success of international cooperation and experience-sharing in nuclear safety and security. This is shown in a recent report by the IAEA co-president, which discusses the “importance of comprehensive security strategies and international cooperation to mitigate risks associated with both traditional and emerging nuclear technologies” in relation to SMRs. In that context, “comprehensive security strategies” include policing infrastructure for resourcing, planning and responding at a community level. From an intra-UK perspective, the mutual aid arrangements sustaining strategic capability mean, for example, that the Police Service for Northern Ireland – the one UK nation not yet to have invested in nuclear energy – may be drawn into policing protests and providing other resources required by SMRs.

Despite their differing jurisdictional concerns, all countries that identify SMRs as a strategic contribution to their climate change efforts will need to account for the same threat, risk and harm profiles, as well as common operational policing imperatives. Unless governments address fundamental local questions of public accountability and consultation, strategic capability and capacity, resilience and readiness, the international SMR programme will face insurmountable domestic challenges.

One clear solution

Even within the limited research literature in the area, there is a wealth of international evidence of the speed with which the SMR option has emerged and how little attention governments have paid to its infra-strategic implications for local policing. This will clearly have an impact on well-established areas of study such as terrorism, resilience, cyber-criminality and the emergence of AI-driven risk, but the implications for neighbourhood safety and security are still a significant blind spot for policing and law enforcement.

In such an underresearched area, we need to identify and address a major challenge in the UK’s efforts to meet its energy needs and global obligations. This challenge is in our understanding of how to police a critical dependency for climate mitigation – and the response should be a redesigned local and national policing capability.

There is a compelling case for urgent multidisciplinary research on the international experiences of rolling out SMRs within an expanding nuclear landscape, and on the many first-of-a-kind lessons that await early adopters of SMRs. At a minimum, the successful introduction of SMRs in the UK will require:

• Protocols for governance. These include accountability and assurance with clear, accessible and transparent (security-compliant) local Policing and Resilience Plans; inter-disciplinary strategic risk analyses and mitigation; and auditability principles and practices that encourage and enable local bodies to frame challenges, and to respond to them fully and promptly.
• Operational capability review. This should involve fully exercised and red-teamed capability and capacity assessments, combined and coordinated emergency responses, intelligence development and rapid vulnerability assessments.
• Data resilience and continuity plans. Digital resilience measures include cyber, data, communications and information security built to withstand concurrent distributed incidents or attacks, as opposed to discrete, isolated events.
• Physical facility protection. This covers control of access to buildings and neighbouring land, as well as maritime and aerial capabilities for surveilling or compromising sites from the sea, rivers or the air.
• Planning and consultation support. At an early stage, the police should be involved in building and infrastructure design, contractor vetting and interactive public engagement – not least through efforts to explain, listen to concerns and address myths.
• Education, research and public understanding. These areas involve access to international research, teaching and qualification via CENTRIC, CETaS and similar institutions with relevant expertise.
• Augmented reality tools. Such systems support and reinforce the testing, assumptions and preparedness measures described above – along with the required education, training and understanding efforts – to identify potential research and operational adjustments.

In short, the UK will need to re-engineer its national policing capability. This should provide resilience and assurance against a revised threat, risk and harm profile, with local policing capabilities forming a central part of the Multidisciplinary Design Analysis and Optimisation methodology for the entire SMR programme.

Conclusion

NATO recently warned that the UK’s nuclear power facilities will be vulnerable to ballistic missile attacks from anywhere in the world within 15 years. But there are more immediate risks to the country’s nuclear energy networks. Until the UK reconfigures its strategic capability to map and mitigate the impact of SMRs on its local and national policing structure – and vice versa – the potential of these advances in global energy production will remain unclear. There is an urgent need for research on how the relevant police areas can gain the confidence, capabilities and capacity to support the introduction of SMR into their communities. As things stand, none can.

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors, and do not necessarily represent the views of The Alan Turing Institute or any other organisation.

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