Perhaps not the Koreans you were expecting however. A consortium led by South Koreans firms KEPCO, Samsung, Hyundai and Doosan Heavy Industries and including Westinghouse, Toshiba, and KEPCO subsidiaries has won a $40 billion contract to build four nuclear reactors for the UAE.

This is a big deal not just because of the sheer size of this contract but because they beat out the traditional nuclear powerhouse of France as well as a US-Japanese team of GE and Hitachi.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/12/20091227134925905562.html

Quote :

"S Korea to build UAE nuclear plants South Korea has won a contract to set up four nuclear reactors for the oil-rich United Arab Emirates (UAE). The deal signed on Sunday will authorise a consortium led by the state-owned Korea Electric Power Corp (KEPCO) to design, build and run the reactors that will produce 5,600 megawatts of electricity. While the contract to build the reactors is worth about $20bn, the consortium expects to earn another $20bn by jointly operating the plants for 60 years. The reactors - the first nuclear plants in the Gulf Arab region - are scheduled to start supplying electric power to the UAE grid in 2017. "This deal is the largest mega-project in Korean history," a statement from the office of Lee Myung-bak, the South Korean president, said. "It is more than six times bigger than the previous single contract." Meeting electricity demand Work on the first nuclear plant is expected to begin in 2012, and all four reactors are due to be completed by 2020. The UAE, the world's third-largest oil exporter, needs the nuclear power to help meet an expected rise in electricity demand to 40,000 MW in 2020 from around 15,000 MW last year. South Korea's Lee was present along with Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan, his UAE counterpart, to watch the deal being signed. The South Korean group beat a French consortium and another group led by US giant General Electric. The Korean bid was $16bn lower than the bid submitted by the French group, an industry source said. "We were impressed by the Korean consortium's world-class safety and its demonstrated ability to meet the UAE programme goals," Mohamed al-Hammadi, the CEO of the Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation (ENEC), said in a statement. Surprise choice The choice of South Korea surprised some analysts, who had expected the deal to go to one of the other consortiums for strategic reasons. The UAE's choice must have been based on strictly commercial terms because in terms of political clout in the region it's nil," Al Troner, the president of Houston-based Asia Pacific Energy Consulting, said. "Korea has a good track record in terms of safety and price and it is a surprise to see the US and France are not part of the bid because they are the ones with the more political strength in the Middle East." Nascent nuclear programmes in the Middle East, including in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, have fuelled concerns of a regional arms race. But the UAE has already pledged to import the fuel it needs for reactors - rather than attempting to enrich uranium, the fuel for nuclear power plants - to allay fears about uranium enrichment facilities being used to make weapons-grade material. The United States earlier this year signed an agreement with the UAE for the country to import, rather than produce, fuel for its nuclear reactors."

I debated about asking this on the Soap Box or Tech Talk, but I just don't know enough about nuclear technology to comment on the specific design that the Korean-Japanese-US team was selling: the APR 1400 reactor plant which is a derivative of an older Westinghouse design (Westinghouse is a part of the team that sold the APR1400 to the UAE). If someone can provide more details on how this technology compares to other existing designs, I would appreciate it. Here's a link with details on the reactor.

http://nuclearstreet.com/blogs/nuclear_power_news/archive/2009/11/18/under-the-hood-with-duncan-williams-south-korean-apr-1400-reactor-plant-surprises-uae-officials-11182.aspx

12/28/2009 7:34:30 PM

It looks like a pretty standard design based on the article you posted, though 1400 MW is pretty good sized.

I'm pretty sure South Korea has the manufacturing facilities for producing the vessel and other large metal components. The US doesn't--which will pose interesting problems if/when our own nuclear Renaissance comes along.

12/28/2009 7:41:41 PM

Okay, I was curious because they had talked about some interesting features such as missile shielding of the reactor and a reduction in system redundancies. Given how cheap the reactor was, I was wondering if it was simply more efficient engineering or perhaps some new design.

I am surprised however that the United States no longer has the manufacturing capabilities to build such components however. While the number of companies with the sort of tooling and facilities to take on a project of this size has shrunken dramatically, I thought a few companies such as GE still had the machining capability (last I remember, they still built conventional turbines in places like South Carolina). If it is true however, it is a real tragedy.

12/28/2009 8:00:55 PM

Passive safety features and reduced component counts are both typical features of the next generation of reactor designs. Other than the fact that they're actually building one, I wouldn't say there's anything particularly special about the APR-1400 described in the article.

Yeah, it's definitely unfortunate that most of the large forging operations are now overseas. It would've been awesome had our government had the foresight and political fortitude to cultivate a strong global nuclear industry based in the US.

12/28/2009 8:18:56 PM

Good for SK. Really fucking shitty thats its not us, thanks to our worthless congress.

12/28/2009 8:37:27 PM