Skip to main content

PBMR News

By Eric McErlain
The South African company that's making the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) has announced their plants to build a pilot fuel plant to supply the demonstration power plant:
"We're already in the market for acquiring equipment relevant to the production of nuclear fuel,"” highlights PBMR construction projects group project pirector Brent Hegger.

"This process will probably continue for the next nine to twelve months,"” he reports.

The pilot fuel plant will be built at the South African Nuclear Energy Corporation (Necsa) complex at Pelindaba, but construction will not start until the PBMR company gets all the necessary licences and permits from the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism and the National Nuclear Regulator.

"“Once we have all these approvals, we are looking at a 24-month building programme for the pilot fuel plant,"” he states.
Mining Weekly is also reporting that the PBMR Company is attracting interest from potential customers who have other applications in mind beside electric generation:
"“We have a team working on technicalconcepts and a business case for usingPBMRs for several process-heat applications, including desalination, hydrogen production, and multipurpose industrial and resource-extraction applications, and we hope this will be finished by October,"” reveals PBMR construction projects group project director Brent Hegger.

"Desalination would be a spin-off of process-heat plant applications of the PBMR,"” he points out.
Finally, they also provide a nice sidebar on how the PBMR works.

Technorati tags: , , , , ,

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How Nanomaterials Can Make Nuclear Reactors Safer and More Efficient

By
The following is a guest post from Matt Wald, senior communications advisor at NEI. Follow Matt on Twitter at @MattLWald.

From the batteries in our cell phones to the clothes on our backs, "nanomaterials" that are designed molecule by molecule are working their way into our economy and our lives. Now there’s some promising work on new materials for nuclear reactors.

Reactors are a tough environment. The sub atomic particles that sustain the chain reaction, neutrons, are great for splitting additional uranium atoms, but not all of them hit a uranium atom; some of them end up in various metal components of the reactor. The metal is usually a crystalline structure, meaning it is as orderly as a ladder or a sheet of graph paper, but the neutrons rearrange the atoms, leaving some infinitesimal voids in the structure and some areas of extra density. The components literally grow, getting longer and thicker. The phenomenon is well understood and designers compensate for it with a …
1 comment
Read more

Missing the Point about Pennsylvania’s Nuclear Plants

By
A group that includes oil and gas companies in Pennsylvania released a study on Monday that argues that twenty years ago, planners underestimated the value of nuclear plants in the electricity market. According to the group, that means the state should now let the plants close.

Huh?

The question confronting the state now isn’t what the companies that owned the reactors at the time of de-regulation got or didn’t get. It’s not a question of whether they were profitable in the '80s, '90s and '00s. It’s about now. Business works by looking at the present and making projections about the future.

Is losing the nuclear plants what’s best for the state going forward?

Pennsylvania needs clean air. It needs jobs. And it needs protection against over-reliance on a single fuel source.


What the reactors need is recognition of all the value they provide. The electricity market is depressed, and if electricity is treated as a simple commodity, with no regard for its benefit to clean air o…
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nuclear Plant Closures Are a Crisis for Small Town USA

By
Nuclear plants occupy an unusual spot in the towns where they operate: integral but so much in the background that they may seem almost invisible. But when they close, it can be like the earth shifting underfoot.

Lohud.com, the Gannett newspaper that covers the Lower Hudson Valley in New York, took a look around at the experience of towns where reactors have closed, because the Indian Point reactors in Buchanan are scheduled to be shut down under an agreement with Gov. Mario Cuomo.


From sea to shining sea, it was dismal. It wasn’t just the plant employees who were hurt. The losses of hundreds of jobs, tens of millions of dollars in payrolls and millions in property taxes depressed whole towns and surrounding areas. For example:

Vernon, Vermont, home to Vermont Yankee for more than 40 years, had to cut its municipal budget in half. The town closed its police department and let the county take over; the youth sports teams lost their volunteer coaches, and Vernon Elementary School lost th…
Post a Comment
Read more