POWER PLANT DESIGN | HIGH TEMPERATURE REACTORS
Whatever became of the PBMR?
Tom Ferreira
Is a crisis and project communication specialist He was communication manager of PBMR (Pty) Ltd from establishment of the company in 1999 to its closure in 2010
It’s alive and well and living in the USA, where about a dozen South African nuclear engineers and scientists who were involved with South Africa’s abandoned Pebble Bed Modular Reactor project are now part of a team developing a similar concept, says Tom Ferreira. This raises the question: why did the Zuma administration cancel the project?
REMEMBER THE PEBBLE BED MODULAR Reactor project on which the South African government pulled the plug just over a decade ago? A team of South African engineers and scientists who were involved with the project are now spearheading the development of a similar concept in the United States.
The X-energy project Being developed by the Maryland based company X-energy, the US pebble bed reactor could be ready for market in about six years’ time, with a first project planned for Energy Northwest’s Columbia nuclear power plant site in Washington state. Quite ironically, it is not inconceivable that South Africa
could be one of the company’s first international customers. X-energy is planning to have its first plant connected to the grid by 2027, after which the plan is to commercialise the reactor on a large scale.
The South African PBMR project — at its peak the biggest
nuclear design effort in the world — was abandoned by the Zuma government in 2010 after about R10 billion had been spent over a period of more than ten years. At the time, it was hailed as the concept that could solve the country’s energy shortages. In addition, the plan was to manufacture as many of the components locally as possible, thereby creating thousands of jobs. The intention was furthermore to sell these reactors
overseas to countries such as the USA and the UK. In fact, PBMR (Pty) Ltd at one point had both a US investor (Exelon and later Westinghouse) and a UK investor (British Nuclear Fuels Ltd).
The South African scientists and engineers at X-energy
were recruited around eight years ago, some of them receiving “Einstein visas” (a visa reserved for immigrants with “extraordinary ability”) and green cards in a record time of 14 days.
Above: Leading the SA design team at X-energy. Dr Martin van Staden (left) and Dr Eben Mulder, with a model of the Xe-100 (80MWe) high temperature gas-cooled pebble bed reactor and fuel pebble
16 | April 2022 |
www.neimagazine.com
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