Japan deal boosts SA reactor

Cape Town - The Pebble Bed Nuclear Reactor Company (PBMR) has - despite the menace of dramatically curtailed government finance - just concluded an agreement with Japanese manufacturer Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) on collaboration in building the first pebble-bed nuclear reactor.

PBMR spokesperson Tom Ferreira admitted that the company has lost "a few good people" in recent months.

He believed that that the suspension of government funding could mean that competitors like China would get ahead of the PBMR and be the first to build a commercially successful high-temperature nuclear reactor.

MHI had a contract to build the PBMR's initial design for a helium-cooled turbo generator. This was one of the contracts cancelled last year when it became evident that, amid the Eskom crisis and the international credit crisis, there would not be enough government funding available for the project.

The PBMR then changed its strategy to a smaller design for the production of high-temperature steam that could be used for power generation or for industrial applications in the petrochemical industry, for oil sands extraction in Canada, for water desalination or for hydrogen production.

The new agreement with MHI forms the basis of negotiations on products that offer potential for collaboration.

Since the 1990s the PBMR has been developing this new-generation high-temperature gas-cooled nuclear reactor, rather than conventional water-cooled nuclear reactors. It's a smaller reactor that can be expanded on a modular basis and which, according to the designers, is inherently safer.

- Sake24.com

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