The shareholders of Romanian nuclear energy company Nuclearelectrica announced on July 19 they approved the continuation of the project to develop Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) based on the updated pre-feasibility study.

The project in Romania is being developed by the joint venture RoPower Nuclear SA, controlled in equal proportions by Nuclearelectrica and Nova Power&Gas part of the private group E-INFRA group, the owner of the site in Doicești, where the construction of the SMR project with an installed capacity of 462MW is being considered, to replace a former coal-fired thermal power plant.

Shareholders of government-controlled Nuclearelectrica have now approved the conclusion by the SMR project company RoPower Nuclear, in which Nuclearelectrica holds a 50% stake, of the contracts related to phase 2 of the FEED (Front-End Engineering Design) study for the project, which will be carried out by Fluor, with the US company NuScale as a subcontractor.

To finance the development of the project, Nuclearelectrica shareholders, among whom the government holds an 82.5% stake, agreed to increase almost 11-fold the ceiling of the loan extended by the company to RoPower Nuclear on August 16, 2023, from $22mn to $243mn.

But the loan will be executed “only to the extent that it will not be possible to secure the financing of the SMR project from other sources (share capital, generated by the change in the shareholding structure of RoPower Nuclear, or bank loans/credits or other sources of financing) and, in any case, only until such other sources of financing are identified,” according to Nuclearelectrica shareholders.

Three months ago, faced with the same decision, the ministry abstained from voting.

The Romanian project, and its financing from funds of the state-controlled Nuclearelectrica, was publicly questioned because of the economic risks posed by the SMR projects around the globe.

In a project based on the same technology, NuScale Power announced last autumn that it had agreed with the Utah Municipal Association to end the company's small modular reactor project, due to costs being too high. The energy cost would have reached $89 per MWh.

NuScale hopes to build SMRs in Romania, Kazakhstan, Poland and Ukraine.