An Oregon designer of small modular reactors has linked up with a venture to build four small reactors at the Department of Energy’s Hanford site in Washington. The same design company also lined up an undisclosed amount of incoming cash and a pipeline for parts from a Japanese company.
Both transactions were announced Wednesday.
NuScale Power of Corvallis, Ore, has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Grant County Public Utility District to see if its small modular reactor design can be used in what could be the first Washington reactor complex to go online since 1984.
The Grant Public Utility District is part of a joint venture with Energy Northwest of Richland, Wash., and X-energy of Greenbelt , Md., to build four 80-megawatt modular reactors at Hanford by 2027. Under this venture, Energy Northwest would provide a partially built reactor site abandoned in the early 1980s and operate the facility. X-energy is another reactor design firm.
Also Wednesday, NuScale announced the signing of an investment agreement with Japan-based engineering and manufacturing company IHI. Corp. IHI is to provide an undisclosed amount of money and manufactured parts to NuScale.
Small modular reactors are prefabricated facilities with parts manufactured in one location, then transported to the reactor site for final assembly. A modular segment would consist of a mini reactor of 50 megawatts to 300 megawatts. The design allows for extra modules to be added as needed. Southeastern Washington’s Tri-Cities, which includes Richland, hopes to become a prefabrication site for small modular reactors.
NuScale’s small modular design has passed a technical review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, making this small modular reactor design the farthest along in the nation in obtaining NRC approval.
The Grant Public Utility District will conduct due diligence and aim to decide by the end of the year whether to stick with the venture involving the Hanford land. The district is a potential customer for the reactor complex.
A second project at Hanford is also in the works and might go online in 2027. This is a 350-MW Natrium reactor, a sodium‐cooled fast reactor potentially to be built on the site of another partially built reactor site owned by Energy Northwest. This would be a joint venture between Energy Northwest and TerraPower, a Bellevue, Wash., reactor design developer founded by Bill Gates. Energy Northwest said it is in talks with the company about the project, but TerraPower said it has not yet settled on a site and is considering several locations.
Both of these projects are near the 1,150-MW Columbia Generating Station owned and operated by Energy Northwest. This is the only commercial reactor operating in the Pacific Northwest.
Energy Northwest used to be called the Washington Public Power Supply System. The group tried to build five reactors in the 1960s and 1970s: three at Hanford and two in Satsop, Wash., but only Reactor No.2, now the Columbia Generating Station, was finished. The others were never completed because cost overruns and massive delays led to Washington Public Power Supply System in 1982 suffering the biggest bond default in Wall Street history up to that point.
