India to export nuclear heavy engineering
India's largest engineering group, Larsen & Toubro (L&T) is preparing to venture into international markets for supply of heavy engineering components for nuclear reactors. It plans to form a 20 billion rupee (US$ 463 million) venture with Nuclear Power Corp. of India Ltd (NPCIL) for domestic and export nuclear forgings as the nation pursues talks with the USA for civilian atomic technology.
In the context of India's trade isolation over three decades L&T has produced components for pressurized heavy water reactors (PHWRs) at Rajastan, Madras, Kalpakkam, Narora, Kakrapar, Kaiga and Tarpur: a total of 17 reactors. It has also secured contracts for 80% of the components for the fast breeder reactor at Kalpakkam, now under construction. The company can produce control rod drive mechanisms, steam generators, valves and reactor pressure vessels. It is qualified by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers to fabricate nuclear-grade pressure vessels and core support structures, achieving this internationally recognised quality standard last year. There are only about ten major nuclear-qualified heavy engineering enterprises worldwide, which creates a bottleneck in reactor orders.
WNN 16/7/08, Bloomberg.
UK contracts Sellafield management and defines clean-up costs
The UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) has announced the choice of Nuclear Management Partners Ltd to manage the large Sellafield complex and associated facilities for minimum five years (and up to 17 years) at £1.3 billion per year. Nuclear Management Partners is a consortium of URS Corporation's Washington Division, AMEC and Areva NC. The shares in Sellafield Ltd, the site licence company, will be transferred from BNFL to Nuclear Management Partners as parent body for the duration of the contract.
In addition the NDA has said that, after three years of work, it had now been able to produce an "underpinned baseline" for the cost of the total UK decommissioning and clean-up program. The project involves decommissioning 26 first-generation Magnox power reactors, the Dounreay, Windscale, Harwell and Winfrith research sites, as well as the huge Sellafield complex. The discounted nuclear liability is now estimated at £40.7 billion with a further £3.4 billion for the construction and lifetime costs of a deep geological repository, total £44.1 billion. The undiscounted costs for the whole 130-year program of decommissioning and clean-up are £63.5 billion, and the NDA's share of the undiscounted cost for construction and operation of the geological repository is £10.1 billion.
WNN 11 & 18/7/08.
Innovative Russian reactor prototype
Rosatom and Russian Machines Co have put together a joint venture to build a novel prototype 100 MWe power reactor at Obinsk by 2015. The SVBR is modular lead-bismuth cooled fast neutron reactor from Gidropress, derived from a design used in submarines with 70 reactor-years operational experience. It is an integral reactor, with the steam generators sitting in the same molten metal pool as the reactor core. It will be able to use a wide variety of fuels. The unit will be factory-built and shipped as a 4.5m diameter, 7.5m high module, then installed in a tank of water which gives passive heat removal and shielding. A power station with 16 such modules is claimed to supply electricity at lower cost than any other new Russian technology as well as achieving inherent safety and high proliferation resistance. There are several Japanese, US and S.Korean small fast reactor design concepts with similarities to the SVBR, but none has been commercialised yet.
Nuclear.Ru 10/7/08.
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