British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is supporting plans to invest taxpayers’ money to develop “a new generation of mini nuclear reactors to help keep the lights on while hitting the U.K.’s stringent carbon emission targets,” London’s Financial Times reported yesterday. Support for small modular reactor (SMR) technology is expected to form part of Boris Johnson’s “10-point plan for a green industrial revolution” which he will set out before winter, FT reported. The project’s objective will be to set up 16 SMR power stations by 2050 and is expected to draw in some of the U.K.’s oldest industrial names, including Sheffield Forgemasters and British Steel, which will be suppliers to Rolls-Royce and others, FT surmised.
According to available details, these SMRs will have a rated capacity of 440 MW with a lifetime of 60 years. Estimated cost for manufacturing and setting up the first SMR in place is about $2.9 billion. After the first five, the cost of later SMRs is expected to go down to about $2.1 billion each. The FT wrote, “the small modular reactors would be manufactured on production lines in central plants and then transported to sites for assembly.”
Meanwhile, South Korea has also signaled its appetite for developing small floating nuclear reactors. South Korea’s Korea Atomic Research Institute is already in joint venture with Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah City for Atomic and Renewable Energy to develop 100 MW “system-integrated modular advanced reactor” (SMART) — a light water reactor-type SMR unit — is designed for generating electricity and for thermal applications such as seawater desalination. The work began in 2011, it became stalled, and is now moving forward again.
In addition to developing the SMART brand of SMR, World Nuclear News reported yesterday the signing of an MOU between South Korea’s Kepco Engineering & Construction Company and Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering to cooperate on the development of floating nuclear power plants. WNN cited Kepco saying the agreement is expected to lead to the development of floating offshore nuclear power plants equipped with BANDI-60 reactors, a small modular reactor design it has been developing since 2016. The BANDI-60 is a block-type pressurized water reactor with a power output of 200 MWth or 60 MWe. Once developed and mounted on a ship, these floating reactors could provide heat and electricity to sparsely populated coastal areas of South Korea.
