Fermi Energia AS today sends out invitations to tender to three developers of a new generation of small modular reactors: GE Hitachi, NuScale and Rolls-Royce.
Bids, together with the detailed technical documentation needed to estimate the construction costs, are expected by December and Fermi Energia will make a technology selection in February 2023. Fermi Energia's international partners and shareholders helped to draft the detailed call for tenders. The technology selection criteria include technological maturity, the establishment of a reference plant, economic competitiveness and the participation of Estonian companies in the supply chain. The best bidder will be awarded a contract for the development and preliminary works of the project.
"We started the technology selection process back in 2019, mapping all the credible companies developing new nuclear technologies, of which there were several dozen in the world at the time. Some of them have proven to be more successful, and from the successful ones, we have to choose the most suitable for the Estonian circumstances and electricity system, taking into account the final price of the electricity produced for the consumer. All three of the small reactor manufacturers participating in the tender have initiated formal construction permit procedures with regulators in major countries and it is expected that the first reactors of their kind to be built will be generating electricity by the end of the decade. It makes sense to choose the best of the proven new generation reactor technology for construction in Estonia," explained Kalev Kallemets, head of Fermi Energia.
Fermi Energia is planning to build a new generation of small-scale power plants in Estonia to ensure weather-independent electricity generation at a fixed price starting from 55€/MWh for its customers in the long term. The cost of building a small-scale reactor with standardised, factory-produced components will be significantly lower than large nuclear plants built so far, and the short construction time will help to reduce the risk of delays and associated costs. "Compared to the long-term fixed-price contracts offered to residential and industrial customers in the Baltic market, the electricity generated by small reactors is several times cheaper and we want to offer this to the customers with whom we have fixed-price cooperation agreements for electricity supply," Kallemets added.
"Both NuScale and GE Hitachi are US government-backed companies, while Rolls-Royce's small modular reactor has received £210 million of investment from the UK government. All three companies have reached design maturity over the last few years, which gives them considerable confidence in the feasibility of their projects. The introduction of the new generation of small reactors will also give Fermi Energia the opportunity to move ahead with the technology selection at the planned pace," said Marti Jeltsov, Chief Technology Officer at Fermi Energia.
GE Hitachi's BWRX-300 small-scale reactor has been the reference technology for Fermi Energy in nearly a dozen studies to date, and construction work is already underway on a site near Toronto, Canada, with NuScale and Rolls-Royce planning to start initial construction in the coming years.
For more details on the range of small reactors, please see. https://fermi.ee/vaikesed-moodulreaktorid/