Facility could be first commercial advanced SMR station on continent
Ghana nuclear power plant company Nuclear Power Ghana and US nuclear technology project developer Regnum Technology Group have reached an agreement to deploy a single NuScale Voygr-12 small modular reactor plant in the West African country.
The two companies plan to form a subsidiary company in the near future to own and operate Africa’s first commercial advanced light-water SMR plant.
The US Department of Energy (DOE) said the agreement was signed at the US-Africa Nuclear Energy Summit in Nairobi, Kenya.
Regnum provides expertise and planning for the development of large-scale infrastructure projects. It has partnerships with a number of private entities, including Portland, Oregon-based NuScale.
The DOE said it has provided more than $579m (€522m) since 2014 to support the design and licensing of NuScale’s Voygr SMR power plant.
It said the Voygr is the only SMR design currently certified by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The certified plant has a capacity of 50 MW per module, but NuScale is seeking to increase the power for each module to 77 MW, a move which is under review with the NRC.
If the Ghana plant has 12 modules of 77 MW each, its total capacity will be 924 MW.
Following the November 2023 cancellation of the Carbon Free Power Project in Idaho, NuScale’s most advanced project is an effort to build a 462-MW nuclear generation facility with six 77 MW modules on the site of a former coal-fired power plant in Romania, chief executive officer John Hopkins said earlier this month.
The Carbon Free Power Project was for the construction of a 462-MW demonstration NuScale Voygr SMR power plant at the Idaho National Laboratory that was scheduled to be online in 2029.
The DOE said SMRs can help meet the needs of communities around the world, offering flexibility in power, size, and operations in urban and remote settings. They have relatively small physical footprints, can adjust their electricity output to match demand, are flexible enough to pair with renewable generation, and can benefit markets beyond electricity.
The US and Ghana recently Africa’s first regional clean energy training centre to support the development of civil nuclear energy programmes as countries across the continent consider deploying nuclear power reactors for their low emissions and energy security
The DOE said the centre will serve as a regional training hub for Ghana and other like-minded African countries considering nuclear energy as part of their economic development, energy security, and decarbonisation goals.
Earlier this year, Stephen Yamoah, executive director of state-owned project company Nuclear Power Ghana, told NucNet Ghana was aiming to choose a technology provider for a proposed first nuclear power station in 2024 and was already carrying out a series of studies at a preferred site, although financing remained a “major challenge”. He said plants might be large-scale units or SMRs.
