U.S. small modular reactor (SMR) developer NuScale Power LLC in Portland, Ore., said it had formed a strategic partnership with British-based electronics security company Ultra Electronics, which has its systems installed in more than 500 nuclear plants and other facilities around the world.
The agreement, said NuScale, brings Ultra Electronics' expertise in reactor protection system design, nucleonics instrumentation, nuclear qualified sensors and associated in-core, specialty cabling to the NuScale design team.
Ultra Electronics will work closely with a long-standing partner of NuScale, Rock Creek Innovators, the company said. They will work on “development and deployment of the reactor protection system and other safety-related I&C systems for the NuScale SMR.
NuScale Power is developing a new kind of nuclear plant, which it considers a safer, scalable version of pressurized water reactor technology. Fluor Corporation, a global engineering, procurement, and construction company with a 60-year history in commercial nuclear power, is the majority investor in the company, which was the sole winner of the second round of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) competitively-bid, cost-sharing program to develop nuclear small modular reactor (SMR) technology.
NuScale believes its design offers the benefits of carbon-free nuclear power, but without financing issues that plague large capacity nuclear power plants.
The company envisions a nuclear power plant comprised of individual NuScale Power Modules, each producing 50 megawatts of electricity (gross) with its own factory-built combined containment vessel and reactor vessel, and its own packaged turbine-generator set. A power plant can include as many as 12 NuScale Power Modules to produce as much as 600 MWe, gross (570 net, nominal, after house loads).
The reactor coolant is driven by natural circulation and can be shut down safely with no operator action, no AC or DC power, and no external water supply. NuScale power plants are scalable – additional modules are added as customer demand for electricity increases. NuScale's technology also is ideally suited to supply energy for district heating, desalination, and other applications.