South Africa’s Pebble-Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) company on Tuesday announced that it has signed a R17,5-million contract with United States group Westinghouse.
The contract is for the basic design of automation safety sub-systems for the PBMR’s demonstration power plant (DPP) at Koeberg in the Western Cape.
The contract with Westinghouse Electric Company is for the basic design of the reactor protection system, the manual shutdown system and the post-event instrumentation system.
The reactor protection system shuts down the reactor automatically when certain plant parameters are exceeded, such as reactor outlet temperature, PBMR said.
The post-event instrumentation system provides information about important plant parameters during and after all the “design-basis events”, the company added.
Design-basis events are all the postulated events taken into consideration in the design of the plant that could be considered a threat to the security of a nuclear reactor, the safety of its personnel and that of surrounding communities.
These systems are developed in accordance with standards recognised by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in the US, which has the highest nuclear standards worldwide, the PBMR said.
“Joining up with Westinghouse in the basic design of the automation safety sub-systems is a two-fold opportunity for PBMR,” said DPP project director Brent Hegger.
“The PBMR will automatically be in compliance with the strictest requirements for nuclear safety in the world; and the successful completion of this contract will remove one more challenge in the global marketability of the South African reactor.
“Notwithstanding this, we draw confidence from our association with a global pioneering nuclear power company and a leading supplier of nuclear-plant projects and technologies,” Hegger added.
Westinghouse technology is used in about 50% of the world’s nuclear plants that are operational.
The basic design phase has a duration of about two years and completion is anticipated towards the end of 2007, PBMR said.
The South African PBMR is the most advanced reactor design in the world at present and included many attributes of a generation-four reactor, for which criteria demand an inherently safe system as the basis of the engineering and physics design, PBMR said.
It is based on German pebble fuel technology and contains low-enriched uranium encased in three layers of ceramics, which in turn is embedded in a graphite matrix about 60cm in diameter, the company added.
Under development since 1993, the PBMR project entails the building of a demonstration reactor project near Cape Town and a pilot fuel plant near Pretoria.
The current schedule is to start construction in 2007 and for the demonstration plant to be completed by 2010.
The first commercial PBMR modules are planned for 2013. — I-Net Bridge