Newcleo expands cooperation with Slovakia

The agreement aims to foster closer cooperation between nuclear experts from both companies, focusing on Newcleo's lead-cooled fast reactor (LFR) technology and mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel.

Specific areas of cooperation may include the assessment of deploying Newcleo's LFR technology in Slovakia, exploring fuel cycle solutions to potentially re-use Slovakia's used nuclear fuel inventory, collaborating on research and development activities and developing skills and capabilities in advanced nuclear technologies.

"Slovakia has more than 50 years of nuclear tradition, know-how, and human capital in highly-skilled experts, and VUJE has been the cornerstone of nuclear in this field," said Newcleo CEO Stefano Buono. "We aim to partner with VUJE on further technical development of advanced nuclear reactors which can make use of spent nuclear fuel. This cooperation agreement could further accelerate our R&D and engineering activities in Europe.

"I am convinced that this cooperation can bring us closer to a role model solution for many European countries to decarbonise their electricity production effectively and provide a sustainable solution to their stocks of spent nuclear fuel."

VUJE CEO Matej Korec added: "VUJE, as the Slovak market leader in nuclear energy and services, is keen to cooperate on further development of state-of-the-art nuclear technologies. We believe advanced modular reactor technologies and closing the fuel cycle have great potential for the future of nuclear energy in Slovakia and Europe. By participating in Newcleo's plans, we hope to help the technology become available sooner."

This agreement is the first entered into by Newcleo's recently established Slovak subsidiary, Newcleo sro.

In December last year, Newcleo signed a memorandum of understanding with Slovakia's Ministry of Economy and state-owned radioactive waste management company JAVYS to explore collaboration opportunities and further develop advanced modular reactor technologies.

Newcleo said its LFR AS-30 reactor design has been optimised over the last 20 years leading to the concept of an ultra-compact and transportable 200 MWe module with improvements in energy density compared with other technologies. Costs are kept low by means of simplicity, compactness, modularity, atmospheric pressure operation and elevated output temperature.

The first step of Newcleo's delivery roadmap will be the design and construction of the first-of-a-kind 30 MWe LFR to be deployed in France by 2030, followed by a 200 MWe commercial unit in the UK by 2033.

At the same time, the company will directly invest in a MOX plant to fuel its reactors. In June 2022, Newcleo announced it had contracted France's Orano for feasibility studies on the establishment of a MOX production plant.