History of the South African PBMR project

摘要

High temperature pebble-bed gas-cooled reactors have been under development in Germany, primarily through the German government's Jiilich research centre, since the 1950s. A prototype plant at )ulich, AVR, which produced 15MW of electrical power, operated from 1967-88. This was followed up by a demonstration plant, THTR-300 (300MW), which went critical in 1983. It last generated power in 1988 after numerous technical problems had been encountered and was formally closed in 1989. The AVR was generally portrayed as highly successful and later design concepts were based on the AVR rather than the THTR. Subsequently, the THTR-300 designer, ABB, joined forces with Siemens, which had also designed a similar size plant producing a new design. The joint venture company, HTR, now owned by Areva NP and Toshiba/Westinghouse following various mergers and takeovers, promoted this design for a couple of years before giving up active promotion of it although continuing to sell technology licenses.rnThe HTR design was taken up by South Africa in 1993 by the publicly-owned electric utility, Eskom. HTR cooperated with Eskom who produced a design which, unlike its predecessors, was expected to generate electricity using a gas turbine driven directly by the helium coolant gas rather than via a heat exchanger and a conventional steam circuit. In 1998, these efforts were made public and Eskom then forecast that following completion and operation of a demonstration plant, commercial orders would be possible from 2004 onwards. The electrical output has been uprated from 110MW in 1998 to 165MW.