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British jet engine maker Rolls-Royce said on Tuesday it has set up a new business to build a series of smaller, cheaper nuclear reactors as the UK looks for ways to cut carbon emissions and lower nuclear energy costs.
The company said the type of reactor proposed by Rolls-Royce would cover about two football fields, or about one-tenth the area of a conventional nuclear power plant.
These plants would produce less power – about one-seventh of the output of the massive nuclear facility being built at Hinkley Point in southwest England.
But Rolls-Royce said it hopes to reduce construction costs to around £2 billion ($2.7 billion) each, compared to an estimated £22.5 billion for the Hinkley Point facility. Some of the savings can come from building lots of plants and making modules in factories that can then be assembled on site.
The company hopes to build 16 plants, known as small modular reactors, and each could power about a million homes, he said.
The British government will contribute a £210m grant to develop the plants, Rolls-Royce and its partners, Exelon Generation, an American nuclear power company, and BNF Resources, a private company, will jointly invest £195m in the three projects. years.
The government is seeking clean energy sources to replace Britain’s aging nuclear power plants, but Rolls-Royce models are unlikely to be online for at least a decade.
In addition to being a tool to achieve ambitious emissions targets, the government sees the small nuclear program as a way to deliver on its promise of job creation in northern England, which Rolls-Royce says most of the investment will depend on. The government also hopes to create an export industry that supplies such facilities to other countries.
However, the UK is likely to face competition from recently self-proclaimed France. small reactor programand the United States, where operators are working on similar concepts. Last week, Portland, Ore-based Nuscale Power, announced a deal Building small modular reactors in Romania.
Despite the risks of accident, nuclear energy gains new interest in Europe and elsewhere as a tool for countries to achieve increasingly ambitious targets to reduce the carbon emissions responsible for climate change. Nuclear power plants are valuable because they provide large amounts of low-carbon electricity.
Rolls-Royce’s work on nuclear energy dates back to the 1950s, when it helped design Britain’s nuclear submarines.
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