PBMR Contract - 4th Generation Nuclear Power Plant by 2014

Rod Adams — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 08:46:22 +0000

PBMR (Pty) Ltd. has taken one more step in its careful journey to build a new type of nuclear power plant - one whose heat will be produced in a continuously refreshed bed of high temperature spheres made of heavy metal and graphite.

On August 22, 2008, the company announced that it had signed a contract for engineering, procurement, project and construction management (EPCM) services to build a 165 MWe commercial scale, emission free, demonstration plant near Cape Town, South Africa. The approximate value of the contract is a quarter of a billion US dollars.

China’s Second Pebble Bed Reactor Steam Plant; World’s Third Commercial HTGR

Rod Adams — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 18:49:34 +0000

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.

Green Options » HTR-10

PBMR Contract - 4th Generation Nuclear Power Plant by 2014

China’s Second Pebble Bed Reactor Steam Plant; World’s Third Commercial HTGR