Next month, it would be four years since the Fukushima Prefecture in Japan was shaken by a magnitude 8.9 earthquake which caused the area’s nuclear plant to meltdown, exposing residents and the environment to dangerous levels of radiation.
That kind of disaster would not happen when Shandong’s twin 105-megawatt reactors become operational in 2017. That’s because it is a Generation IV reactor immune to a nuclear meltdown, claimed Zhang Zuoyi, director of the Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology (INNET), reported MIT Technology Review.
The high-temperature pebble-bed nuclear facility, to be cooled by gas, is scheduled to go online in 2017. It is being built by the Nuclear Engineering Construction Corporation of China (NECCC). In the next 18 months, the builder will install the components of the reactor, run tests and load the fuel in time for its scheduled operation in November 2017.
The reactor, according to RT, is made up of thousands of small pebbles made of uranium fuel with a graphite sphere case the size of tennis balls. It is the pebbles’ graphite coating that ensures the fuel would not break down even if the reactor’s temperature exceeds a particular threshold.
Zhang said that INNET, a division of Tsinghua University, developed the meltdown-proof technology in the last 15 years. It was based on a design developed by SGL, a German company. Once online, it is designed to generate 210 megawatts. It would then be followed by another 600-megawatt plant in Jiangxi Province.
But those plants would not just remain in China. Those meltdown-proof reactor would be sold by China overseas after Chinese President Xi Jinping signed in January a contract with Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz for NECCC to build Saudi Arabia a gas-cooled high-temperature reactor.
Zhang foresees the technology reaching the world market by 2021. He said, “We are developing these reactors to belong to the world.”