Perhaps not the Koreans you were expecting however. A consortium led by South Koreans firms KEPCO, Samsung, Hyundai and Doosan Heavy Industries and including Westinghouse, Toshiba, and KEPCO subsidiaries has won a $40 billion contract to build four nuclear reactors for the UAE.This is a big deal not just because of the sheer size of this contract but because they beat out the traditional nuclear powerhouse of France as well as a US-Japanese team of GE and Hitachi.http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/12/20091227134925905562.html
12/28/2009 7:34:30 PM
It looks like a pretty standard design based on the article you posted, though 1400 MW is pretty good sized.I'm pretty sure South Korea has the manufacturing facilities for producing the vessel and other large metal components. The US doesn't--which will pose interesting problems if/when our own nuclear Renaissance comes along.
12/28/2009 7:41:41 PM
Okay, I was curious because they had talked about some interesting features such as missile shielding of the reactor and a reduction in system redundancies. Given how cheap the reactor was, I was wondering if it was simply more efficient engineering or perhaps some new design.I am surprised however that the United States no longer has the manufacturing capabilities to build such components however. While the number of companies with the sort of tooling and facilities to take on a project of this size has shrunken dramatically, I thought a few companies such as GE still had the machining capability (last I remember, they still built conventional turbines in places like South Carolina). If it is true however, it is a real tragedy.
12/28/2009 8:00:55 PM
Passive safety features and reduced component counts are both typical features of the next generation of reactor designs. Other than the fact that they're actually building one, I wouldn't say there's anything particularly special about the APR-1400 described in the article.Yeah, it's definitely unfortunate that most of the large forging operations are now overseas. It would've been awesome had our government had the foresight and political fortitude to cultivate a strong global nuclear industry based in the US.
12/28/2009 8:18:56 PM
Good for SK. Really fucking shitty thats its not us, thanks to our worthless congress.
12/28/2009 8:37:27 PM