Pebble bed modular reactor

Later about 10

Pebble Bed Modular Reactor ( PBMR Ltd. ) Is a parastatal South African company based in Centurion, which had set itself the goal of building on the basis of German licenses and with support from the Research Center Jülich a nuclear pebble bed reactor with helium turbine at Koeberg near Cape Town.

History

In Germany was already working on pebble reactors since the late 1950s. ABB and Siemens interatomic also developed modular concepts, such as the HTR - module with 200 MWth based on the AVR Jülich.

These developments were in the late 1980s largely ended after the failure of the prototype thorium high- temperature reactor ( THTR ). In 1988 Johan Slabber met, later Technical Director (CTO ) of the " Pebble Bed Modular Reactor ," with Rudolf Schulten and Kurt Kugeler. Here the idea for the production of a South African pebble bed reactor, which should be produced by the local industry was created. Slabber was a leading developer of nuclear weapons of the former South African apartheid government. The first South African efforts to PBMR technology were addressed in reality to military application, namely as a drive for nuclear submarines, as classical nuclear technology because of the international embargo against apartheid was no longer available. Only after the end of apartheid in 1994 it was a civilian nuclear project.

From 1998 to 2008, PBMR Ltd enlarged. almost 1,000 employees and about 1,500 external Zuarbeiter. This PBMR Ltd. belonged. the world's largest suppliers of nuclear technology. Due to escalating costs and schedules, safety and technical problems and lack of customers for the planned reactor, the South African government decided in September 2010, largely dissolve the company and to leave only around 10 employees to manage the compiled knowledge. This decision was implemented by the end of 2010. As an impetus for the failure of the PBMR reactor and the decline of the company 's revelations by Rainer Moormann called to concealed problems of pebble bed reactors. Moormann received the whistleblower Price 2011.