Putting the cat amongst the pigeons – certainly as far as South Africa is concerned – is an announcement by shipbuilders, Samsung Heavy Industries (SHI) in South Korea, and Danish energy company Seaborg Technologies, who have signed a partnership agreement to develop Floating Nuclear Power Plants or Power Barges which promise in addition to generating ‘clean’ electricity, can utilise waste heat from the reactor as a power source for hydrogen and ammonia plants.
SAMSUNG Heavy Industries (SHI) and Seaborg have entered into a partnership agreement to develop floating nuclear power plants based on Seaborg’s inherently safe Compact Molten Salt Reactor (CMSR). The agreement includes development of hydrogen production plants and ammonia plants, as the CMSR is claimed to be an ideal power source for supply of stable, clean, and safe electricity.
(The concept of a moored power station will be familiar to followers of the controversial Powerships tender but instead of using the price volatile and carbon intense LNG to produce electricity, this concept interestingly utilises nuclear in the form of a SNR – small nuclear reactor. Ed)
CMSR is a carbon-free energy source that can efficiently respond to climate change issues and is a next-generation technology that meets the vision of Samsung Heavy Industries. In addition, when an abnormal signal occurs inside the reactor, the liquid nuclear fuel, molten salt, is solidified to prevent serious accidents at the source, and provides high safety and high efficiency power and hydrogen production at the same time.
“Through this agreement, we plan to pioneer the CMSR-based floating nuclear power plant market as part of strengthening its future new business opportunity” says Jintaek Jeong, president of Samsung Heavy Industries.
“We are honoured and proud to have formed this partnership with Samsung Heavy Industries, one of the world’s largest and most experienced shipyards. It is another step forward in our quest to introduce a new generation of nuclear reactors that are clean and safe and can be built using industrial technology with all the benefits of scalability, speed, and lower costs,” says Troels Schönfeldt, CEO and co-founder of Seaborg.
The aims of the strategic partnership is to factory manufacture and sell turn-key power plants in volume, ready to be moored at industrial harbours and connected to the electric grid onshore.
The stable production of energy also offers a fundamental basis for production of all Power-2-X fuels, where especially hydrogen and ammonia are considered a future energy source to replace traditional fossil fuels. The design of the hydrogen, ammonia and power units will be optimized for efficient serial construction at SHI’s shipyards.
About the CMSR-based Floating Nuclear Power Plant
The floating nuclear power plant comes as a turn-key product, ready to be moored at an industrial harbour. In the harbour, a transmission cable will be connected to the electric grid onshore. An optional solution is to place a hydrogen or ammonia production plant next to the floating nuclear power plant utilizing the CO2-free fission energy to produce hydrogen and ammonia.
The floating nuclear power plant design is modular delivering up to 800 MW-electric for the 24-year lifetime and cost competitive whether it plugs into the grid in an existing coal port or powers production of hydrogen and ammonia.
When an abnormal signal occurs inside the reactor, it is designed to solidify molten salt, a liquid nuclear fuel, to prevent serious accidents at the source, providing high safety and high-efficiency power and hydrogen production at the same time.
The core of this concept is Seaborg’s Compact Molten Salt Reactor –CMSR. Conventional nuclear reactors have solid fuel rods that need constant cooling, typically using water under high pressure.
In the CMSR, fuel is mixed in a liquid salt that acts as coolant. This ensures it can always be cooled and it cannot melt down or explode. It will simply shut down by itself in case of an emergency.
The importance of this is not only the safety but also a significant reduction in complexity and cost.
Time line
According to company spokesperson Per Mikael Jensen, in an exclusive CBN interview with Editor Robin Hayes, Seaborg originally estimated to have a prototype CMSR plant operational by 2026, but the war in Ukraine has pushed this date out to “around 2028, due to the disruption in the nuclear market with Russian suppliers of e.g., enriched uranium being irrelevant. We are now in negotiations with other potential suppliers” he said.
“Our pursuit to make nuclear an inexpensive, sustainable and safe technology has been eight years in the making and is based on designs that were first developed in the 1950’s and 1960’s but largely abandoned due to the absence of advanced technologies at the time”.
Factory assembly – like a car plant
While Seaborg has a pocket of excellence in the design and development of the CMSR plant, it was a logical step to partner with SHI who have extensive expertise in the nuclear field and in heavy engineering and manufacturing industries. South Korea is a world leader in the field of nuclear engineering which exports its technology widely. The country boasts 23 nuclear reactors providing 23GWe.
“The concept of building CMSR’s on a production line – similar to a car factory – presents many advantages over site constructed plants and we estimate that up to fifty or more 100MW containerised plants could be constructed each year. These would be integrated with SHI’s shipbuilding expertise to complete the ‘Barge’ package”.
Conclusion
Nations, particularly in the West, are arrogant in their vision for energy delivery in less developed typically Equatorial countries where resources for renewable energy simply don’t exist – limited or no potential for hydropower, where the sun doesn’t shine often, or where the wind rarely blows. These countries, like Vietnam for example, plan to construct many more coal fired power stations to meet their need for energy in the future.
It must also be remembered that to manufacture one 3MW wind turbine can take up to 5t of copper which means excavating 5 000t of copper bearing ore! Also some solar panels use a particularly nasty greenhouse gas – man made nitrogen trifluoride – in their manufacture. There’s nothing ‘green’ or sustainable about either of these processes! (Ed.)
“That’s where the CMSR concept has the potential to revolutionise energy delivery in years to come” concluded Jensen.
