March 17, 2014

SRNS: FLUOR

By ExchangeMonitor

While Fluor announced yesterday it would become the majority investor for small modular reactor vendor NuScale, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions President and CEO Dwayne Wilson says the move would not influence the contractor’s choice of reactor design in its plans for an energy park at the Savannah River Site. “This doesn’t have a direct bearing on the site,” Wilson said on the sidelines of the Weapons Complex Monitor Decisionmakers’ Forum. “We want to remain neutral, to give everybody the opportunity to use the site.” Fluor is the lead company for site contractor SRNS, which signed agreements last year with small reactor vendors Hyperion and GE-Hitachi to explore the possible deployment of those designs in the proposed energy park. SRNS officials said yesterday that the contractor would continue to consider all technologies, emphasizing that success depends on the ultimate commercialization of the design.

Yesterday Fluor announced that it would invest more than $30 million in NuScale and would purchase shares that had been held by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission after the indictment of majority investor Francisco Illarrimendi in January. The infusion comes at a critical time for the Oregon-based company, which had been forced to scale back work and lay off employees earlier this year. Fluor also entered into a separate agreement with NuScale to provide services to the company and retain exclusive rights to engineering and construction services for future NuScale plants. The vendor is marketing a 45-megawatt light water reactor design that could be deployed in multi-module facilities of up to 12 units.

Comments are closed.