The Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) Company has awarded a R260-million contract to IST Nuclear, a member of the IST group, for the detailed design of three key systems for the demonstration plant.
The largest single contract in the IST group’s history, it will be executed over 42 months and will more than double the IST Nuclear division’s current turnover of some R37-million per year, the group said on Monday.
The budgeted expenditure on the contract — which will run concurrently with the PBMR contracts previously awarded to IST Nuclear — is R19-million for the period July to December 2003.
It is expected that IST Nuclear will also be retained for other aspects of the PBMR project should the construction phase be approved. The award of this contract follows the announcement last year that IST Nuclear had been appointed as the supplier of three systems — fuel handling and storage; reactivity control and shutdown; and gas conditioning and control — for the PBMR demonstration phase as well as for the first 10 commercially produced plants, should the project reach that stage.
The demonstration phase of the PBMR project, which is still subject to government consent and regulatory approvals, involves the construction of a demonstration plant at Koeberg near Cape Town and an associated fuel plant at Pelindaba near Pretoria. The demonstration plant is scheduled for completion in about five years’ time.
Eskom started investigating the PBMR in 1993. The revolutionary design is claimed to be safe, but major nuclear powers including the United States and Germany have failed to apply it commercially.
South Africa’s Director General of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Crispian Olver said earlier this year that he was satisfied that the PBMR was safe from an environmental impact point of view.
The company said three systems were now being designed — the fuel handling and storage system, the reactivity control and shutdown system and the gas systems. – I-Net Bridge and Staff Reporter