MOZWELI remains the same
MOZWELI remains the same and is just as intense. In any event, we encourage a client to take a 50MWe or a Mozweli MHTR100 flagship because they are going to come back in two or three years’ time saying, “We need some more power.” Will the COP28 talks have an impact on the growth of your market? There is a lot of talk that nuclear is the way to go for climate change mitigation. Going into the future, the economies of the world must be hydrogen-based. To make bulk hydrogen, you need bulk energy and that should come from a nuclear power plant. Hydrogen produced from a nuclear power plant is known as pink hydrogen. Hydrogen is made through Permeable Electrical Electrolysis (PEE), the latest technology. The Europeans and the British are moving to hydrogen in a big way because they believe that all future technologies will move away from fossil fuels to hydrogen. We need to be supplying hydrogen and so we have a latch-on unit onto our power plant, which can produce hydrogen if electricity is not required at that time. _________________ We are saying to African countries, here’s a Mozweli power plant as big as a soccer field, put it where you need the power ________________ questions that the anti-nuclear people have, and therefore government today feels comfortable that they can increase nuclear capacity. The age of large nuclear power plants like Koeberg, I don't think will happen again. South Africa needs 300 Mozweli 100MWe power plants. In the next 10 years, we will lose 10 gigawatts from coal. You need to replace that with 100 Mozweli power plants. From 2030 to 2040, you will lose another 10 gigawatts from coal and you will have to replace that with another 100 Mozweli plants, and from 2040 to 2050 you will need another 100. The proposal that we put to government for South Africa to be energy secure is that you actually need 300 plants, that’s 30 gigawatts of power, just to be back where we were in 1976. I believe the IRP will go through changes and there will be an increase. Renewables will never be able to produce 30 000MWe in 30 years. There's just not enough land space and the transmission lines don’t have the capacity. The only way to go is nuclear because you don't need to build additional transmission lines, you put the power where you need the power. Do you get a sense that a future Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) might include more nuclear capacity? The IRP that was signed in October 2019 allocates 2 500MWe to small modular reactors. That was put in there just to see how everybody would respond. That is an underscore, because Eskom has announced that it will shut down 10 gigawatts of coal-powered stations in the next 10 years, that is 10 000MWe. They are only going to replace that with 2 500MWe, so they are basically short of 7 500MWe. There are talks to update the IRP to a 2022 version and they are looking at bigger support for nuclear. The process to go nuclear has been extremely well supported; even the anti-nuclear people have gone quiet because the pebble technology we are presenting is so safe. It's important to understand that we have now mitigated all the Do you have a lobby group? We have a public lobby group in the Eastern Cape which is very proactive and busy. As the Mozweli Group we are making progress and on the issue of affordability for the government, we agree with that. Government has made it clear that any vendor presenting a nuclear solution must also come with a financial solution. We have spoken to financial investors who will gladly come into the country and invest and assist in the programme. That diffuses the accusations that government will not be able to afford nuclear. The technology is sound, the proof of concept is working and the team is ready. It is a South African team and we have 26 years of experience. Why not? Nobody will get hurt in the process, and you will have sustainable security of energy going forward. The MHTR plant with four reactor units. 16 | www.opportunityonline.co.za
DG 1 DG 2 EDG 1 DG 1 DG 2 EDG 1 EDG 2 DG 1 DG 2 DG 3 DG 4 EDG 1 EDG 2 EDG 3 EDG 4 Pebble technology offers multifaceted solutions Inherently safe technology. NUCLEAR POWER The Mozweli High Temperature Reactor (MHTR) is a Pebble Technology, high-temperature, helium-cooled reactor based on the evolutionary designs of the German Arbeitsgemeinschaft Versuchsreaktor (AVR), High Temperature Reactor-Modul (HTR- Modul), Thorium High Temperature Reactor (THTR) and People’s Republic of China (PRC) Pebble Bed Reactors (PBRs). Building on a new surge of innovative nuclear pebble technology, Mozweli intends to generate clean, sustainable and efficient power for Southern Africa and Africa. The MHTR series of Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs), also referred to as Pebble Small Modular Reactors (PSMRs), are based on Pebble Technology for a High Temperature Reactor (HTR). These high-temperature, graphite-moderated, helium-cooled reactors are designed, marketed and commercialised by Mozweli Nuclear Engineering (MNE), a division of Mozweli (Pty) Ltd registered in the Republic of South Africa. The MHTR Unit is the basic building block of any Mozweli PSMR (one-, two- or four-unit plants). Each unit has its own dedicated Power System (PS) comprising a Nuclear Steam Supply System (NSSS) and Power Conversion System (PCS). What is a Pebble Bed Reactor? A Pebble Bed Reactor (PBR) is a design for a graphite-moderated, gascooled nuclear reactor. It is a type of Very High Temperature Reactor (VHTR), one of the six classes of nuclear reactors in the Generation IV initiative. The basic design of PBRs features spherical fuel elements called pebbles. These tennis ball-sized pebbles are made of pyrolytic graphite, which act as the moderator. The pebbles contain thousands of micro-fuel particles called Tri-structural Isotropic (TRISO) particles. These TRISO fuel particles consist of a fissile material (such as Uranium-235 (235U)) surrounded by Controlled a ceramic Disclosure layer coating of silicon carbide for structural integrity and Mozweli fission (Pty) Ltd MHTR100 product IAEA BOOKLET containment. In the PBR, thousands of pebbles are amassed to create a reactor core. 7. PLANT ARRANGEMENT Plant Area NUCLEAR POWER PLANT (MHTR25 NPP) MV/HV Yard Shared Site Assets: SSB 1 Turbine Building 1 Reactor Building 1 Unit 1 Electrical Building Main Control Room EC&I (Electrical Equipment, DCS1 Equipment) Spent Fuel Area 1 PLANT A Plant SSB Balance of Plant - Facilities - Buildings - Structures Figure 2: Schematic Block Diagram – MHTR Nuclear Power Plant Configurations The primary buildings on a typical MHTR power plant are as follows: • Reactor Building(s) - Yards - Areas - Utilities Plant Area NUCLEAR POWER PLANT (MHTR50 NPP) MV/HV Yard Shared Site Assets: Power Module 1 Turbine Building 1 Reactor Building 1 Electrical Building MSSB 1 Turbine Building 2 Unit 1 Unit 2 Main Control Room EC&I (Electrical Equipment, DCS1 Equipment) Mozweli MHTR NPP Configurations Shared Plant Reactor Building 2 PLANT A Plant SSB Spent Fuel Areas 1, & 2 Balance of Plant - Facilities - Buildings - Structures - Yards - Areas - Utilities Plant Area They are cooled by a gas, such as helium, nitrogen or carbon dioxide, which does not react chemically with the fuel elements. How do PSMRs work? 1. Nuclear power plants generate heat through nuclear fission. The process begins in the reactor core. Fissionable atoms are split apart by neutrons, releasing energy and producing heat and more neutrons as they separate into smaller atoms. The process repeats again and again through a fully-controlled chain reaction. 2. Control rods made of neutron-absorbing materials regulate the amount of heat generated. 3. The reactor coolant absorbs the radiant heat and circulates through a steam generator. 4. High-temperature steam drives a steam turbine which is connected to an electric generator. Electricity is generated when it is rotated. 5. The used steam is condensed to water and recycled back to the steam generator to produce high-temperature steam again. Four reasons why Pebble Bed Reactors are better than conventional reactors. Safety by design: By encapsulating fuel in ceramic coated particles, radioactive fission products are prevented from escaping, even at very high temperatures. Combined with other safety features, this rules out a large-scale release of radioactive material in all accident scenarios. Safety by temperature: PBRs have a very large negative temperature coefficient. Fission reactions stop, by physics alone, when the temperature in the reactor exceeds a certain level. NUCLEAR POWER PLANT (MHTR100 NPP) MV/HV Yard Power Module 1 Turbine Building 1 Reactor Building 1 MSSB 1 Turbine Building 2 Unit 1 Unit 2 Shared Plant Reactor Building 2 Electrical Building Main Control Room EC&I (Electrical Equipment, DCS1 & DCS2 Equipment) Shared Site Assets: Spent Fuel Areas 1, 2, 3 & 4 PLANT A Plant SSB Power Module 2 Unit 3 Unit 4 - Facilities Turbine Building 3 Reactor Building 3 - Buildings - Structures MSSB 2 Shared Plant Turbine Building 4 Reactor Building 4 Balance of Plant - Yards - Areas - Utilities Safety and efficiency in fuelling: PBRs can be continuously fuelled. Conventional reactors must be shut down to refuel. In PBRs there is a continuous fuelling process. Power generation continues without interruption. Higher generation efficiency, and safety: PBRs are designed to operate at high temperatures, with a correspondingly higher efficiency of electricity generation and potential to generate process heat for industrial use. PBRs use helium – an inert gas – as a coolant, preventing unwanted chemical reactions and further enhancing the safety of the system. www.opportunityonline.co.za | 17
