Despite some focused opposition, South Africa has continued to invest in the PBMR project because it makes sense , and provides reliable electrical power to keep lifting the living standards of its population.
There is some excitement in the nuclear focused blog world about “The World’s First Commercial High Temperature Nuclear Reactor” based partly on a recent article in Power Engineering by Jana Miller titled “Powering Up A Growing Nation”. This project in Shandong Province will be a unique plant whose reactor heat source is two containers full of spherical fuel elements, each one of which is about the size of a billiard ball.
I am a bit reluctant to call this plant a “first”, but I can get just as excited about the third, 10th or 100th plant in a progressive series of improved plants that should number 1000 reactors or more.
The plant, designated as HTR-PM, will be a 200 MWe pebble bed reactor heated steam plant with two reactors, each with a single steam generator (boiler) feeding a single turbine. The plant will be built in Rongchen City on a site large enough to host series of perhaps 10-12 similar plants. In that area of China, there are hundreds of older coal fired power plants generating 50-300 MWe each.
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