South Africa's Pebble Bed Nuclear Power Project Going the Combined-Heat-and-Power Route with Chinese Cooperation

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar land, Texas)--The saga of South Africa's Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) nuclear reactor, which has been running for 15 years, has developed from being a solo pioneering effort at the start to being about the meeting of minds globally. This broader approach will allow the project to go forward with a development model configuration that will please as many users as possible. At the beginning of February, the PBMR Company, based near Pretoria in Centurion, said that the global financial crisis and the impact that it had on funding and, in particular, on the country's power utility Eskom, had made them consider near-term market opportunities based on customer requirements to service both electricity and process heat markets. This is a smart move as the concept of combined heat and power is seen as a broad generic model in the industry. It is one of the major paths forward as a less wasteful and inherently cleaner power model in place of the traditional model of burning fuel to make steam to drive generator turbines and then worry about the wasted hot and dirty exhaust emissions going up the flue into someone else's blue sky.

At the end of 2008 Eskom "postponed" planning for its second 2,000-megawatt (MW) nuclear power plant, as it geared up to gather $41 billion for its urgent base power building program. The utility's nuclear build topic will lie buried until the shape and direction of the new of government becomes apparent after the country's April general election.

Formed in 1999 and now with 800 staff members plus university research affiliates, PBMR has in recent months been involved in technology development on indirect-cycle steam turbine systems in response to "growing interest from the process heat and cogeneration markets in Southern Africa and internationally." PBMR has said that there is growing interest in South Africa in the possible use of PBMR technology in petrochemical complexes and specifically by Sasol (NYSE:SSL) (Johannesburg), a major global synfuel and chemical firm. PBMR units could also produce process steam or hydrogen or both to upgrade coal products in addition to electrical power generation. The company says that Canadian oil sands producers are interested in the PBMR to produce the temperature and associated pressure needed to extract bitumen from oil sands, replacing gas-fired plants.

The signing of a memorandum of understanding by PBMR in Beijing at the end of March with China's Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology (INET) of Tsinghua University and Cinergy Company Limited of China is intended to facilitate cooperation on identified areas of common interest with the two countries collaborating in a number of strategic and technical areas relating to high-temperature-reactor (HTR) projects in both countries.

PBMR CEO Jaco Kriek said that while the two projects have chosen slightly different technical approaches there was a common belief that high-temperature, gas-cooled reactors using pebble fuel offered the best potential for sustainable, clean, reliable and safe sources of energy globally. The Chinese commissioned a 10-MW research reactor in Beijing in 2000 and achieved full power operation in 2003. The first commercial scale plant in China (HTR-PM) will use indirect-cycle steam turbine systems, whereas PBMR has been developing a direct cycle gas turbine system. The HTR-PM will have two 250-MW thermal reactor modules and a 210-MW electric steam turbine generator set.

In January, PBMR announced the successful manufacture of high-temperature fuel in the form of uranium-dioxide coated particles containing 9.6% enriched uranium in collaboration with the South African Nuclear Energy Corporation, based in Pelindaba, which was once the site of South Africa's long-terminated military nuclear program. The coated particles were shipped to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the U.S. to be compacted into specimens and then be subject to irradiating testing at Idaho National Laboratory. PBMR fuel differs from conventional fuel in that the particle coating, which forms a part of the fuel, acts as the fission product barrier when conventional nuclear fuel uses a metal barrier. Construction on the PBMR demo reactor could start in 2010 and the model template illustrating the technology for a fully commercial unit has quoted a power output of 165 MW, although this rating is somewhere in the middle of a wide range of various industry estimates.

PBMR's development activities are linked to the Department of Energy's Next Generation Nuclear Plant project through a range of research and development deals backed by Westinghouse (Monroeville, Pennsylvania), the Shaw Group (NYSE:SGR) (Baton Rouge, Louisiana) Sargent and Lundy (Chicago, Illinois) and INET.

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