Stratek Global and Groupe Albatros sign strategic partnership
South African high-temperature gas-cooled reactor developer Stratek Global has announced a strategic partnership with France's Groupe Albatros with the aim of preparing feasibility studies for potential projects in Africa and the Middle East.
Stratek says that the partnership is aimed at deploying its small modular reactors (SMRs) across Africa and the Middle East. Chairman Kelvin Kemm said: "The Stratek Global consortium has spent decades developing an extremely advanced nuclear reactor which crucially does not need a large body of water to operate. Currently, worldwide, a limitation of most nuclear power plants is that they need to use the ocean for cooling, or a very large lake. We can put our HTMR-100 reactor absolutely anywhere, water or no water."
Groupe Albatros Chairman Henri-Guillaume Gueydan said: "As Africa and the Middle East pursue ambitious energy security and industrialisation goals, the need for reliable, scalable, and emissions-free power generation has never been greater. A world future for SMR systems is unfolding in front of us right now. We cannot miss the opportunity."
The Pretoria-developed HTMR-100 design is to produce 100 MW of heat and 35 MW of electricity and is derived from the South African Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) programme, which was to have been a small-scale high-temperature reactor using graphite-coated spherical uranium oxycarbide tristructural isotropic (TRISO) fuel, with helium. South Africa had been working on the PBMR project since 1993, however, in 2010 the government formally announced its decision to no longer invest in the project, which was then placed under 'care and maintenance' to protect its intellectual property and assets.
Kemm said they had had interest from "provinces, municipalities, individual companies and even agricultural groupings, who have realised they can own their own nuclear reactor due to its small size and feasible economics".
Groupe Albatros consists of Aloris and Sigedi and has decades of experience in energy and engineering projects, including nuclear energy ones. The first phase of the partnership aims to see feasibility studies and site selection in South Africa, Nigeria, Namibia, and Oman.
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