‘Plug and play’ micro-plant will be deliverable to ‘anywhere’
US nuclear company Westinghouse is seeing significant interest in a project to build a transportable nuclear power plant that will provide “always-on” power in areas where the construction of nuclear projects would be traditionally considered economically or technically impractical.
Westinghouse and Prodigy Clean Energy, a Canadian developer of marine- and land-based transportable nuclear power plants, or TNPPs, are designing what they say is a solution for the constant demands for electricity and heat in these types of harsh, remote climates.
Their TNPP would have a 5-MW Westinghouse eVinci microreactor and would be prefabricated and transported to a site for installation at the shoreline or on land. The first unit could be operating by in Canada by 2030.
“From the start, our eVinci technology was designed to be transportable, that was a key design principle,” said Jon Ball, eVinci technologies president for Westinghouse.
“So, we designed it to be small, we made it plug-and-play, and we made it deliverable to anywhere. The TNPP from Prodigy brings an additional value to the inherent transportability of the technology.”
Westinghouse said in a blog post that the eVinci microreactor is the ideal technology to support the TNPP platform.
It uses heat pipes filled with liquid sodium to transfer heat from the reactor core to a power generation system. It requires no water in its operation, so no cooling pumps or other systems found in traditional light water reactors. It has few moving parts while operating, which it can do for eight-plus years without refuelling. Because of these attributes it is often referred to as a nuclear battery.
Westinghouse and Prodigy signed an agreement in 2022 and have completed milestones for conceptual engineering and regulatory studies.
Westinghouse said the next steps for the project include completing the TNPP design for the eVinci microreactor, completing development of a nuclear oversight model for TNPP manufacturing, outfitting and transport, and progressing licensing and site assessments to support a first project.
