On Monday morning, the British Government signed a contract with Rolls-Royce to build the nation’s first small modular reactors (SMRs). These are nuclear fission reactors that are manufactured in modules before being assembled on-site. Three reactors will be manufactured at the Wylfa power station on Anglesey, and it is estimated that the project will generate enough electricity to power around three million of today’s homes for 60 years. For the first time in a long time, progress is actually being made towards British energy independence.

This has clear benefits. SMRs are more compact and require smaller sites compared to conventional nuclear power stations, and they are standardised and easily replicable as demand increases, allowing costs to be kept relatively low. Successive governments’ energy policies have proved frustrating, with a focus on expensive, low-conversion renewables. Add a refusal to issue new North Sea oil and gas licenses to provide a buffer against energy crises, and it’s easy to see why the UK has the highest prices in Europe. What the new nuclear deal represents, if the project actually goes ahead, is the beginning of a solution to the energy crisis.

The joy stemming from Monday’s announcement is, however, inseparable from a deeper frustration that Britain should not be facing such a monumental energy crisis at all. Labour, Tory and Coalition governments all wilfully allowed Britain’s nuclear capacity to age and close without replacement.

Nick Clegg, on the eve of becoming deputy prime minister in 2010, argued against developing further nuclear capacity because the new reactors wouldn’t come on stream until about 2021 or 2022. In 2010, evidently, making policies that would have a demonstrable, exponentially positive impact only 12 years into the future was viewed as something completely far-fetched and unacceptable.

Short-termism has remained a major problem for British governments, across policies not limited to energy and infrastructure. The SMR deal could be a signal that politicians are finally beginning to think of the future of Britain beyond the next election. Caution should still be exercised, though: it would not be wise to count one’s reactors before they have been built. This is why the current and future governments’ next steps will be so crucial.

While the current Rolls-Royce deal for Wylfa is for three SMR units, the site itself has the capacity for eight. Using less than half of the available site space is a tentative measure as, for once, Labour is wary of wasting money. This should be viewed as a national priority and, in this instance, caution should be thrown to the wind in favour of an even larger potential upside in the relatively near future.

These reactors are just one part of what should be a wider nuclear policy. Aside from SMRs, Energy Minister Michael Shanks has stated that Great British Energy is currently searching for sites for another large-scale nuclear reactor project following Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C. It’s clear, then, that Labour is starting to wake up to the true scale of the energy crisis and look for new solutions. A nuclear-forward baseload backed with an underlying foundation of other renewables is a solid countermeasure to the trilemma of financial cost, national security and decarbonisation.

The SMR model, however, has yet to be proven at scale, and the fiasco surrounding Hinkley Point C — which has now been delayed until 2030 and faces rising costs totalling almost £50 billion — does not inspire confidence in Britain’s capacity to deliver complex energy infrastructure on time and within budget. The direction that the Government is taking is sound, and its rationale for doing so is on the right track, but whether it all comes to fruition remains to be seen.