3.5x More Power Per Hectare: Why CFF Sites Are Smaller and More Productive Than Anything Being Built

Smaller Than a Retail Park

A single CFF site occupies 55 hectares — roughly 136 acres, or about 77 football pitches. That's smaller than most retail parks. Smaller than many industrial estates. Smaller than a lot of golf courses.

From that compact footprint, one CFF site produces:

• 3,600 MWe of electricity
• 2,072 tonnes/day of green hydrogen
• 50,000 m³/day of desalinated water
• District heating at £500/yr to ~280,000 homes
• Oxygen, chemical feedstocks, and industrial outputs

Now compare that to what the UK is currently building.

The Comparison That Should Alarm You

Site	Land Area	Electricity	MWe Per Hectare	Other Outputs
One CFF Site	55 ha	3,600 MWe	65.8	+ hydrogen, water, heating, industrial
Hinkley Point C	175 ha	3,260 MWe	18.6	Electricity only
Sizewell C	362 ha	3,200 MWe	8.8	Electricity only

One CFF site produces 3.5 times more power per hectare than Hinkley Point C. 7.5 times more than Sizewell C. And it does it while also producing hydrogen, water, heating, and industrial feedstocks — things neither Hinkley nor Sizewell will ever produce.

How Is This Possible?

Two reasons:

1. Modular Architecture

CFF uses 48 compact HTGR modules arranged in 8 six-packs. Each module is factory-built and relatively small (80 MWe). They're packed efficiently within the site perimeter, with shared infrastructure between six-packs.

Hinkley and Sizewell use enormous custom-built EPR reactor vessels that require massive containment buildings, cooling infrastructure, and buffer zones. They're inherently sprawling designs.

2. The 120m Earth Berm

CFF's safety perimeter uses 120-metre earth berms — compacted earth barriers 15 metres thick — rather than the traditional multi-mile exclusion zones. These berms provide equivalent physical protection at a fraction of the land cost. And they're included in CFF's 55-hectare footprint.

This approach is proven at Fort St. Vrain (USA), HTR-PM (China), and military installations worldwide. It's not experimental — it's established engineering.

Compared to Renewables

The power density comparison becomes even more dramatic when you include renewables:

• Solar: ~0.04 MWe per hectare
• Onshore wind: ~0.005 MWe per hectare
• CFF: ~66 MWe per hectare

That makes CFF approximately 1,645 times more power-dense than solar and 13,000 times more dense than onshore wind. And CFF runs 24/7, regardless of weather.

To match one CFF site's electricity output with solar panels, you'd need roughly 90,000 hectares — an area larger than all of Greater London. With onshore wind, you'd need over 700,000 hectares.

Why This Matters for Planning

Smaller sites mean:

• Less environmental disruption — fewer habitats affected, less construction impact
• Fewer planning objections — compact footprints are easier to site and screen
• Faster planning approval — smaller environmental impact assessments
• More site options — 55 hectares of coastal land is much easier to find than 362 hectares
• Less community displacement — minimal land acquisition required

Sizewell C's 362-hectare acquisition displaced farms, disrupted local roads, and required years of planning battles. CFF's 55-hectare footprint avoids most of those problems entirely.

The Bottom Line

Britain is building Hinkley Point C on 175 hectares for £48 billion. It will produce 3,260 MWe of electricity and nothing else.

CFF proposes a site one-third that size, producing more electricity plus hydrogen, water, heating, and industrial outputs. For one-third the cost. Operating for 200 years instead of 60.

The question isn't whether CFF's numbers are too good to be true. The question is why nobody asked these questions about Hinkley before committing £48 billion of public money.

See the full comparison on the homepage.

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Carbon Free Future is an independent proposal by DJ Waugh, a retired engineer from the North East of England.