Westinghouse Backs Pebble Bed Reactor with Purchase of South Africa’s ISTN

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas). South Africa’s ISTN (Pretoria), which is under contract to design key systems for a Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR), will be purchased by Westinghouse Electric Company (Monroeville, Pennsylvania). The acquisition of ISTN should go through in August, after approval by the South Africa Competition Commission. Terms were not disclosed at this time.

Nick Liparulo, VP Engineering Services for Westinghouse said that ISTN was a key participant in the development of the PBMR and that his company had long been a proponent of the project and that the acquisition would allow the company to become even more involved as the PBMR moves towards commercialization. Recently ISTN supplied the helium test facility for the reactor and is working on the design of systems for the demonstration unit to be built at Koeberg, on the Cape Atlantic coast, by 2011. Westinghouse has been working with South Africa’s power utility Eskom (Johannesburg) and other U.S. based investors on the project.

With Eskom moving on a $21 billion expansion program Westinghouse is also looking to expand ISTN’s scope to include servicing light water reactor in the country as 20% of new generating capacity is targeted to be nuclear in order to diversify base load generation away from coal-feed. The market also holds prospects for the Westinghouse third generation AP1000 systems. ISTN, operating as Westinghouse Electric South Africa will become an important growth hub for both the PBMR and PWR business.

The PBMR company will hand a safety analysis report to Eskom in August as the utility will be the first commercial user, and then in 2008, the report will be handed to the National Nuclear Regulator for a year review period. Scheduling the first multimodule plant of the high efficiency and high safety reactor for commercial installation in 2015, the company has already appointed some suppliers. Mitsubishi will manufacture the heavy core barrel and turbine and a Spanish company will come from Spain with the graphite core coming from Germany. By 2030 the company is anticipating that 20 of the 165 MW modules will be in operation both locally and in foreign markets.

Westinghouse, a group company of the Toshiba Corporation (NYSE:TOSBF ) (Tokyo, Japan), will retain all the current 118 employees of ISTN.

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