SOUTH Africa on Thursday awarded a UK-German-South African consortium a contract to design a plant to provide fuel for the country’s Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) project. NUKEM Nuklear GmbH of Germany, British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) and local firm Engineering Management Services will design a fuel fabrication plant to produce the praphite spheres or ”pebbles” used in the PBMR reactors, PBMR said in a statement. ”This should greatly reduce the risk of having sufficient qualified fuel available when our demonstration plant starts operations in 2005,” said PBMR Chief Executive Dave Nicholls. PMBR no details on the value of the contract. PBMR is a design for a new generation mini-nuclear reactor with a capacity of 110 megawatts against the 1_000 or so megawatt capacity of most modern nuclear power stations. – Reuters