
"an overly complex planning system that has lacked clarity"
Well how do you think Sir Humphrey managed to keep his position so long ?
Britain's planning system is still seen as a significant barrier to the development of datacenters. An industry survey of 3,000 "senior datacenter professionals" found that operators, developers, and consultants believe the current process needs further reform to make it easier for them to build bit barns. The report, " …
Well how do you think Sir Humphrey managed to keep his position so long ?
When you look at the reality and just how much commercial property is being built the planning system is clearly not the issue,
What they actually mean is then cannot arbitrarily build what they want, where they want without any constraints and restrictions.
There are millions of square meters of speculative distribution parks and warehouses going up everywhere. Where I live we are in the insane situation where a site that was supposed to include housing has more turned over to warehouses because housing is not commercially viable.
The planning system is no broken.
What we have is well funded lobby groups and a government hell bent on doing anything that involves destroying the environment. That is not just this government but the previous ones as well.
The current Government is just out of control when it comes to granting development. We have 1000s of acres of solar farms on prime agricultural land approved since they came into power. What is utter insanity on this is there are 1000s of acre of commercial roof space with nothing on them. We blindly turn greenfield sites into concrete then separately cover them in solar panels.
Now they want to allow commercial development without any oversight. Just like the insanity that somehow AI is going to make the planning system better as Starmer announced this weekend.
"The current Government is just out of control when it comes to granting development. We have 1000s of acres of solar farms on prime agricultural land approved since they came into power. What is utter insanity on this is there are 1000s of acre of commercial roof space with nothing on them. We blindly turn greenfield sites into concrete then separately cover them in solar panels."
The insanity isn't just the loss of badly needed agricultural land, it's the idea of solar in Britain. Our solar resource is pathetic, solar output is maximised when power is relatively little needed, and all that solar generation does is reduce grid stability and hoover a bit of marginal generator demand, meaning we need to pay bigger subsidies to CCGT owners, because it's only CCGT keeps the lights on through winter peaks.
In the right place I'm all for solar power. But that excludes the entirety of the UK, 51 to 57 degrees north. Solar power is a crap resource for grid scale generation here, yet government seem incapable of understanding this, and is true of the last government, who signed off all the thousands of hectares of solar farms currently blighting the landscape.
An interesting example of solar's ability is the EverReady solar powered light. Disclaimer: I live in Caithness way north. Replacing the third PIR light on my porch I decided to try one of these. My need is for sufficient illumination to a) put my key in and b) make sure I can see the steps on the way out so I don't miss on and god head over heels.
It works really well when we have nice sunny days. During the latest cold snap guess what - not enough light to charge the battery so it became, so several days, a not very good wall ornament.
The wind turbines nearby weren't doing much either.
The current Government is just out of control when it comes to granting development. We have 1000s of acres of solar farms on prime agricultural land approved since they came into power. What is utter insanity on this is there are 1000s of acre of commercial roof space with nothing on them. We blindly turn greenfield sites into concrete then separately cover them in solar panels.
The Ag land isn't really an issue. It's generally grazing land and continues to be dual-use with livestock and solar panels, generating a useful income for the farmer.
Agree entirely however that the lack of solar on commercial roofing is insane. There are some collosal warehouses built on the edge of our town recently and at best there's a handful of panels in one corner. Given the low price of panels and the recent fluctuations in energy prices, even just panelling out to 50% of your own demand (i.e. every Watt generated will be consumed locally, not exported to grid) you insulate your business against energy pricing. If you're in the business of putting up quarter of a million sq.ft of warehouse, you can finance panels as a sensible investment - the payback is barely 3-4years at this point.
And just as a little anecdote, some people will line up and say "ah well, if it was worth doing, businesses would". But this assumes businesses are well run. A friend of mine took a job as a "sustainability officer" at a property-management company who owned an estate of office space and also leased some buildings/floors to sub-let. Their general remit was reycling programmes, getting lighting to LED, coordinating on renewals of things like heating plant to ensure the new system was "good practice" and the CEO could boast about it in the annual report.
The first day he went to accounts and asked "How much do we pay for electric and can we get on a green tariff?".
The answer was "we have no idea", in a lot of cases they were on a default tariff and paying through the nose for energy. It took him a week of digging through accounts paperwork simply to find out who the suppliers were for some sites. Building management hadn't poked accounts, accounts weren't paying attention. The lights hadn't gone off so noone thought about it - bills just got paid as they came in.
He got the buildings they managed onto sensible tariffs (in some cases green tariffs turned out cheapest) and saved the company £100k/yr. That was his first fortnight... some businesses are run efficiently. Some look like they're being run efficiently but actually they could cut their energy bill by 25% if someone spent a couple of hours changing supplier. Sometimes it's the little things that make the big difference, and something like solar panels on the new warehouse would totally make sense except it's noone's specific responsibility so noone makes it happen, or there's some perverse incentive in the corporate structure to keep CapEx down even at the cost of OpEx and TCO.
-- The Ag land isn't really an issue. --
Ever heard of run off? Works much better on concrete than grass.
-- It's generally grazing land and continues to be dual-use with livestock and solar panels, generating a useful income for the farmer --
Up here in the Scottish Highlands its mainly wind turbines and the few solar panels I've seen in fields tend to be mounted fairly close to the ground. To low for a sheep to graze but probably the right height for cattle to tread on. Is it different in the sunny south?
But there will be AI to spot potholes! We still won't actually fill them, but we'll be a world leader in pot-hole identification technology!
Our only hope in this dystopia is the underground hacker collective building pot-hole identifying drones that can also draw a massive cock and balls over the target to encourage some form of action.
Truly, we are living the dream.
Driving along road...
<bump, bump>...
To one of my kids: "Please submit that location to the council pot-hole reporting portal" (kid then updates me on the status of the numerous other reports* we have submitted).
* Which includes things like "hole not large enough to warrant repair", so we have to report it again a couple of weeks when it has grown (and it would have been cheaper just to fix it when it was "inspected").
Whereas we have (in defra's description) severely disadvantaged land the cattle won't graze because it's covered in rushes but can't put solar on it. There isn't enough grid capacity in our area to export the electrons, particularly the transformers. Successive governments forgot about that bit.
And a report that is totally unable to identify with any real clarity what the complexities really are.
I would like to build a data centre, unfortunately a lack of ready capital is preventing me, those bankers and investors are really difficult wanting allows RTOS of stuff I have no knowledge about and thus must be totally unnecessary for my application; perhaps the government can do something that forces these guys to give me the money I want.
"Britain's planning system is still seen as a significant barrier to the development of datacenters."
It isn't. The barrier to development are the developers.
"We want to build this big fuck off huge warehouse in the middle of this field."
"There are several species of wildlife here that would be negatively impacted by this development. What we have instead is this brownfield site..."
"HOW DARE YOU GET IN THE WAY OF PROGRESS"
Fuck the lot of these bastards in to a bin. All of them. Done with their shenanegans of moaning about planning when all these rules are doing are preventing them from making loads of money while erecting a poorly built/designed shell.
Curious that government have identified planning as a problem, when perhaps the most challenging barrier is the UK's totally out of control energy prices. For those who haven't been following this in other threads, the UK's industrial energy prices are about 38% higher than comparable large European nations, and five times higher than the Nordics.
A related problem is the availability of reliable power. A data centre or two won't matter, lots of data centres will certainly start to tax our increasingly meagre generation capabilities.
The government does not care about minor issues like that. It is not there problem & Milliband has it all covered with solar generation.
What is likely to happen (the precedent has already been set by Amazon) is that these companies will contract the entire output of green generating capacity so they can put a tick in the "renewable" box whilst the use of gas continues to increase to make up the shortfall.
Then as usual the public and SMEs pay the high prices so that global megacorps can increase their profits.
Curious that government have identified planning as a problem, when perhaps the most challenging barrier is the UK's totally out of control energy prices.
Of course they're deflecting from failed energy policy. To accept it would mean having to admit it has failed, and that you simply cannot run a country at our latitude, with our weather patterns, on wind and solar alone.
Since that would be contrary to Labour's energy politics of renewable everywhere, it will never be accepted, even as the country browns itself out due to all the new AI bit barns sucking up all the power.
What amuses me is when new solar and - especially - wind farms are built, to hear the solemn undertakings from the owners that they'll be responsible for cleanup/disposal/restoration costs at the site's end-of-life.
"Yes", they say, trying hard to suppress sniggers and with their fingers crossed behind their backs, "in 30 years' time we'll pay to haul away these turbines, we'll pay to remove the giant concrete pads each one sits on, and we'll pay to restore the site to its previous pristine beauty."
In reality - and correct me if I'm being too cynical - when that day arrives, the company will have been sold, taken over, or gone into liquidation, and all those commitments will mysteriously no longer be the responsibility of the present asset owners.
And as for restoring the land to its former beauty? "Hey, look, a post-industrial site with lovely views of more countryside! It's brownfield! That means we can put 2500 Luxury Executive New Build homes on it!"
Grrr.
People say things like this and call themselves too cynical, or cynical regardless. But the cold hard fact of the matter it isn't a cynical position to have, it's a view point born out of seeing it all play out before elsewhere.
The sad thing is that too many people believe in the opposite and allow this shit to continue.
Have a pint my cynical old bean. Welcome to the party.
Working on a 500kW* community turbine the build cost was ~£1.25M, with £150k being needed for decommissioning (which would need to be inflated by the ~25 year service life).
* It's actually capable of producing 750kW, but was downrated as it was built at the time that a 500kW turbine would earn more in feed-in tariff that a 750kW turbine that generated the same amount of power over a year. This was only one of many constructed like this. Crazy, but that's "government policy" for you...
Just watched an episode of Grand Designs where someone built the UK's first "super eco" house (can't remember the actual term) which includes some sort of active roof from Estonia that generates electricity directly.
The roof generates enough power to feed 6 normal houses, but they are only allowed to sell back the equivalent of 4 houses worth (regulations dontcha know) to the grid, the rest currently just has to go to waste.
The cable to a house is rated to feed "one normal house". Diversity* (the house doesn't use full load all the time) allows you to get away with 4 houses worth - it would take more, but allowance has to be made for other houses generating at the same time.
* In the UK the grid only allocates a few amps of continuous supply for a domestic connection (though the peak can go up to 100A for a single-phase supply).
Having been part of the group objecting to a new windfarm (application denied by Highland Council, passed by SCottish Government) what annoys me is the application was for the wind turbines and left out the need for substation and transmission lines.
Personally I just waiting for someone to advertise the replacement for the whiskey trail - come to the highlands and follow the wind turbine trail!
A data centre or two won't matter, lots of data centres will certainly start to tax our increasingly meagre generation capabilities.
Not even generation - it's transmission capabilities. Hence why they keep shutting down wind farms in Scotland when generation exceeds local demand, and the ability to transmit surplus down to England. Scotland could be basically 100% wind powered by now (with a bit of hydro and pumped-hydro buffering) but the Grid can't keep up and shift power to the right places.
The relevant grid operators are (in addition to other billions spend on connecting renewables) starting a £2.5bn project to reinforce Scotland-England grid connections. But therein is the wider power problem - not only have we encouraged wind farms through subsidies that to tot up to many billions, it's costing billions more to connect them. Government ploughs on, ignoring that we have the most expensive energy in the world and adding further multi-billion costs to the system.
"There are several species of wildlife here that would be negatively impacted by this development. What we have instead is this brownfield site..."
In Britain at least, it's almost always the other way round.
Thanks to the agri-chemical revolution of the last half century your typical field nowadays will be an agricultural desert, devoid of all life except for the crop which is being grown. Whereas your typical brownfield site will be an oasis of wildlife. The last refuge for all sorts of species of fauna & flora that until just a few decades ago will have been widespread across the land.
Might seem perverse but in modern overcrowded Britain if you want to do the least possible damage to the natural environment, and protect what little native wildlife we have left, it's often better to build on green fields and leave the brown field sites alone.
Because it is?
I've seen reports saying the issue with the UK planning system is it puts a lot of power to block anything in the hands of a few planning officers. This is at least part of the cause of the "We have no houses being built in this area" lament because when a builder says they want to put up a block the planning officer gets "We don't want them here"
But houses ain't bit barns.
The UK is about the size of a single US state yet HMG has what seems to be a huge number of data centres.
Shouldn't they be trying to reduce that number? Put them in the best parts of the country for cooling and power? The whole of the UK population is roughly 1 3/4 x the size of California.
Just a thought.
"The UK is about the size of a single US state yet HMG has what seems to be a huge number of data centres."
I don't get that impression, but I'm happy for you to prove me wrong with data that shows that the UK is out of kilter with the US national average of either total DCs or government DCs per capita?
"I don't get that impression, but I'm happy for you to prove me wrong with data that shows that the UK is out of kilter with the US national average of either total DCs or government DCs per capita?"
Cloudscene.com says there are 5390 DCs in the US and 512 in the UK. That's about 10x difference, compared to about 5x difference in population. Or to put it another way, the US has about twice as many DCs per person than the UK.
I haven't looked any harder with regards to how big these DCs are, whether they are commercial or government etc.
Since you'd made a start and established the UK has half the number of DCs as the US, I did a perfunctory search on DC capacity (as approximated by power), and those figures according to Mordor Intelligence* are 20.4 GW for the US, compared to 2.2 GW for the UK.
Interestingly that suggests that ***on average*** UK and US DCs are of similar power, which is not what I was expecting.
* Zero marks for the name, guys.
The government said they were going to destroy the greenbelt to build HOMES. But actually the lying bastards are going to destroy the greenbelt to build DATACENTERS.
There are plenty of greenFIELD site that aren't greenBELT sites. The reason they want to use greenbelt land is that it is cheap because you're not allowed to build on it. There are billions of pounds to be made in buying up cheap greenbelt land and then subverting the planning laws to convert it to expensive building land. And that is the ONLY reason they want to do it.
There's a difference between streamlining the application process, by making it clear and unambiguous, having pre-submission consultations, fast-track evaluations for companies with proven track record of local, long term presence, and extra expert staff to vet applications on the one hand, and then there's dropping regulations on the other.
The first can boost the local economy, while keeping a level playing field so smaller companies can also afford to apply.
The second leads to situations where a company gets approved, moves its seat in a third world country, then declares bankruptcy to avoid the cleanup (mines in Wales as an example).
Do data centres really bring the much needed GDP growth to the UK economy, or is it revenue that immediately goes abroad?
If a company builds a data centre, and at the same time invests in a new power plant (MSR?), and improves the infrastructure, then that can work long term.
If not, it will just add pressure onto an eroding infrastructure.
In terms of paying their way, look at the record of the big data players. Most of them placed as many European assets as they could in Ireland to avoid taxes in their actual target markets. In the UK, the big seven players are credibly estimated to avoid around £2bn a year in UK taxes by exploiting the out-of-date wording of UK and international tax laws. There is no way that building more DCs in this country will be a net contributor to the economy.
Moreover, a major construction DC programme will make things far more expensive for road, rail, housing, water and energy programmes because it will be additional demand in a construction supply chain that's already constrained and can't flex to meet the demand.
AFAIAA, there's no SMR technology on commercial offer in the UK yet, nor with prospect of being licensed this decade. So any DC either puts pressure on the grid, or needs to get consented and built a dedicated CCGT (and gas supply). A circa 4MW CCGT is sub-scale and would be disproportionately expensive, I suspect DC builders will work this out, ask for a grid connection, and then as soon as they're told "no can do" they'll be straight onto minsters, crying that the UK's future is in jeopardy. Government have made clear that they'll ignore all the rules that they've spent fifty plus years putting in place. The grid will be told to give them a connection, and we'll sleepwalk into a future of brownouts and even higher energy costs.
I feel as though parts of West Wales would be a pretty good place to put servers - we have ample wind energy (to the point that transmission is a challenge that is causing significant local controversy) and it will be a long time before we run out of water. I don't know how strong the connectivity is, but in other regards points west of Carmarthen might be a practical for data centres and goodness knows we need the jobs.
"I don't know how strong the connectivity is"
But the delays, the delays - remember it's a nanosecond a foot. They have to be near all those trading screens in the city. If they're going to to the job right they really should be inside the M25, even inside the N Circular. How about planting a couple in Downing Street. It's time there was a bit of logic there.
If you've read the book "Flash Money," (by the author of The Big Short) you'll know that for Hedge Funds it's in the same server room as the exchange servers.
That's because reading between the lines HF's AKA High Frequency Traders are mounting automated man-in-the-middle attacks against actual share purchases and front-running them, using their very high number of cancelled transactions as probes of share price and availability.
Basically if you had their hardware and software you could be equally "smart" in your trades.
"and goodness knows we need the jobs"
Minor problem is that construction is short term and doesn't provide enduring jobs, and a typical modern DC employs around 20 technical bods and perhaps 30 security and facilities. You'd need to smother West Wales to make a difference. The business rates might be much welcomed the relevant council, but that assumes that the council don't give concessions that result in the business rates being minimal. History suggests councils are all too keen to offer concessions to large, tax dodging international companies.
The problem with putting them in Wales is:-
1. You never find the place again after they have renamed the anglicised name to Welsh.
2. Even if you do it will take hours to get there to fix faults with the 20mph speed limit.
3. You wont be let in because all the security will insist on speaking Welsh and only Welsh.
4. If you have to be there overnight, you'll have to pay extra in tourist tax.
5. Sheep, because.
My late mother was from Swansea, and she despaired at what has happened to the place in the last 25 years.
Just north of Watford Gap is one of the areas with the lowest wind speed in the UK: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/learn-about/weather/types-of-weather/wind/windiest-place-in-uk
However, it is one of the inland places with the highest density of wind farms as a result of good roads (facilitating cheaper building) and guaranteed income regardless of output.
Also one of the areas with the largest number of huge warehouses (Daventry International Freight Terminal/ Northampton/Daventry, due to M1, M6, A14 and West Coast Mainline)
Anon, because I happen to know that there is very good fibre backbone running through the area and that is not general knowledge.
"However, it is one of the inland places with the highest density of wind farms as a result of good roads (facilitating cheaper building) and guaranteed income regardless of output."
That's not quite true. The national grid is under a "take or pay" obligation for most renewables, and the wind/solar farm owner therefore gets paid so long as the asset is or could be generating power, but what they get paid is proportional to the actual + potential generation. What that means is that for somebody for whom debt is readily taken on and/or has no cost (ie banks) putting it in renewable power is far better than lending it to real businesses. There's virtually no risk for investment in renewable generation - if the asset doesn't work the project developer pays, if the grid can't take the power then the wind farm still gets paid. And across the year, wind and solar averages out very nicely. With the energy suppliers the people purchasing the power there's virtually no bad debt costs. It becomes a licence to print money for banks, subsidised by energy consumers.
If datacentres are classed as CNI does that mean they get preference when we inevitably start running out of electricity and have power cuts? I say inevitably because we aren't building many power stations and there is only so much we can import. Add to that some mass housebuilding and things start to get tricky.
Ofgem have plans that we will indeed import all the electricity we need but haven't been prepared to invest for, through a whole range of new generously subsidised undersea interconnectors. Unfortunately, this plan ignores the fact that a renewable-drive energy market will tighten all across Europe at the same in response to common weather conditions (typically large, stable anti-cyclonic weather) and the availability of renewable power output will shrink as demand rises.
I base my views on over a decade working in the energy sector including for the world's largest energy supplier, and on the latest data from the UK's grid operator. The fact that "most" of your 'leccy may have come from solar has precisely zero relevance to a debate about national capacity.
We're all familiar with the vast areas being taken over at huge expense for UK solar projects, around about 17 GW of plate capacity, yet you know how much they contribute to total generation?
Bugger all in the grand scheme: https://gridwatch.co.uk/
Good one.
Not as pretty as an alternative site but like the https connection.
And once again shows how desperately dependent on Combined Cycle Gas Turbine power the UK is.
And as long as that remains the case the UK electricity price will always be pinned to the gas price.
Sure, but putting a few tens of kilowatts of panels on the roof of a DC isn't going to touch the sides. We're using 50-100kW a rack. Water cooled h200 systems are pushing 250kW a rack, and the next gen open rack standard is looking to double that.
It isn't pointless, but it isn't close to being enough.
"Even yesterday, on a cold winters day most of my houses electricity needs were meet by solar panels on my roof."
Yes, because it was sunny. However, a more typical Winter's day is gloomy, often foggy, with very little solar output. Often the anti-cyclonic gloom with last for a week or so, with no wind or solar output to speaks of.
And how much storage (battery or otherwise) do you have to flywheel through the dull patches?
Does your system track when you did take power from the mains?
I'm not doubting your experience, but are you seeing the full picture.
Say, for the sake of argument, that you wanted to make a datacentre as "green" as possible. How would you do it?
Datacentres and industry in general generate waste heat; they all do and there's nothing you can do about this. Nuclear power generation (which is where we're going to end up, despite the gibberings of lunatics like Miliband) also generate waste heat because they are fundamentally heat engines. The only way to enhance the green credentials of all of this is to use this waste heat somehow.
District heating systems where the heat is distributed as steam via insulated pipes is probably the best way to go about using the waste heat. Water is chemically innocuous, has huge phase change heat and is relatively easy to deal with, plus the level of heat you get from steam is about the level of heat needed to heat homes and hot water systems, which is where most of the domestic energy use is concentrated. Working from this, datacentres are best placed close to towns where the waste heat can be concentrated then fed into district heating systems in the suburbs.
The only fly in the ointment here is that district heating is something that was pioneered by Soviet Russia, and was thus Not Invented Here and will be anathema to UK civil servants.
Having worked with them on this subject I can assure you that policy officials love district heating as a technology. The key problem is that it's hideously expensive to retrofit for most of Britain's housing stock. Think £20-60k per property, and you're in the right ballpark. Now think how you'll recover that cost from the occupants of each property, and the challenge becomes clear.
For new build large estates it's notably less expensive, but that's not going to be a big proportion of the housing stock for a very long time.
"The only fly in the ointment here is that district heating is something that was pioneered by Soviet Russia, and was thus Not Invented Here "
There used to be a powerstation-supplied district heating scheme in central London rather a long time ago. But Battersea's been shut down.
There is still a district based system in London, in the Square Mile, it provides heating, electricity and cooling to residential and commercial properties, including the Guildhall, the Barbican Centre etc, apparently 60 sites in total.
It's called Citigen (implemented by e-on).
Blurb: 'Using a modern tri-generation system with internal combustion engines, Citigen provides district heating, electricity and cooling to this highly populated part of London with ever-growing and changing energy needs.
The network covers over 6km of heating and over 4.5km of cooling to commercial and residential property from the Guildhall to the Barbican Centre, providing heating and cooling for the equivalent of 11,300 homes. Citigen is a key part of the solution for the City of London’s environmental targets.'
Friends now live in Peterborough where this used to exist. All gone away.
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2023/11/10/turning-up-the-heat/#comment-946946
Sweden and other Nordics make it work. It was great not needing to worry about a boiler. And the central district boiler gets efficiently upgraded as technology permits. Perfect.
We're not allowed to share in the UK. Same with flats- every UK flat has its own washer/drier, causing stress and hassle for flat owner and neighbours alike. Not even the US has such anti-socialist paranoia- lots of action in the laundry room there...!
"Policies to incentivize operators to put in place decentralized energy generation, like on-site solar panels or local wind farms, could also help alleviate pressure on the grid, he adds."
Solar panels on a data centre are never going to contribute much to the voracious appetite for power we give silicon. They'll run the rest of the building just fine.
If we regionalised power pricing we'd likely see more bit barns where there is plenty of power (think scotland, rather than london), and/or more power generation built where there are bit barns.
Container sized nuclear is about the only way to get on site generation to supply a modern bit barn.
It's true you can build MW sized reactors to fit an ISO container. The US military developed several during the 60's for remote deployment at what are now called Forward Operating Bases.
It's doable if you a) Use bomb grade enrichment. At >20%U235 cores can be tiny b)Put about a 600 radius circle around it. Easy(ish) to do on a military base. Not so easy in a car park.
Here's a little safety figure for you to ponder. It's been described elsewhere so you can look it up.
A PWR Fuel Element is a block of uranium dioxide fuel pellets 17 rows by 17 columns about 14 feet long. It's the standard fuelling unit of a PWR. most of the used ones have been in a water tank for at least a decade.
Imagine one of these 600m from you. For some reason you decide to run toward it.
You will never reach it. The radiation rises as an distance halves. IOW by the time you're less that 0.6m (2 feet) the radiation level will be 1024x higher. You will pass out and if not pulled back you will die.
It's not just the core, it's the generating system that goes with it. Depending on the architecture that's going to get hot as well. Possibly very hot if you're using nitrogen as coolant (that's what the US Army design did). It's not the reactor that's big. It's the shielding around it (and how much of the Balance of Plant has to be inside the shielding) that hurts you.
They don't tend to use Highly Enriched Uranium, but HALEU (which can be down at 25% of the concentration required to be classified as HEU, which is what you'd need in a bomb).
They aren't externally significantly radioactive, and don't have to be put on a platform in front of the front door anyway.
Used fuel is fantastic stuff, but it's also safely transportable, and not everyone within a mile of a nuclear reactor grows a third arm (however useful that could be).
The generators don't have to be in the same container - heck even the operational shielding doesn't have to be (and that's where you really want heavy shielding). Of course we have operational experience of these things, because we use small scale reactors already, and surprising noone, not all submariners return with two heads... in fact they probably return after a lower radiation dose than they would have received if they'd stayed on the surface.
At the moment it's not commercially viable, but it absolutely could be, and the few companies who could make it happen (i.e. they have the resources and the motivation) are the hyperscale compute people. They need a high power output, 24/7, compact generation option.
These datacenters don't produce 1,000s of permanent well paid gigs per site. Why shortcut law for these?
Even if I was getting my kid a full ride through grammar school and permanent board membership, all the grifter perks, etc, I'd still have some compunction about parcelling off the land for such a dumb project because I want them to have a decent life in a decent country in the future. WTF are these people thinking?
"WTF are these people thinking?"
Easy!
They think they can have a country with no heavy industry, a renewable driven power grid without any despatchable power, that AI can replace all the expensive white collar workers. Those still in employment (politicians, bankers, plumbers, baristas, poorly paid healthcare workers, coppers, assorted van driving tradesmen) can purchase stuff from Amazon, Ali Express Shein, delivered by minimum wage van drivers (themselves to be replaced as soon as self driving becomes a thing). This, sir, is the Circular Economy that previous and current governments want to bring you.
Obviously in the name of Net Zero you'll also be having to give up your car, foreign holidays, meat, effective heating, and soft toilet paper - unless you're rich or part of the political machine.
AIUI (and as all the definitions I can find online UI) "Circular Economy" means recycling old products to make new ones without having to use more raw materials. I don't think you're describing that.
OTOH it's possible that previous, current governments share the same offline definition as yourself but I'm not sure about that.
I do love how everyone's convinced they're the ultimate iconoclast for spouting right-wing talking points against neoliberal economics. Change the record already.
They've been farming us for as long as the idea that "someone deserves more for being the idea(r)s and stratege(r)y guy" has existed. You were content voting for Thatcherites who were setting this up, because you thought you'd be only strangling those commie miners, not realizing the same noose fits your neck just as well.