Romania is seeking to deploy ‘small modular reactor’ (SMR) technology as part of its drive to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and its energy minister Sebastian Burduja said this week that a final investment decision will be taken in 2025 for a new nuclear power plant in Doicești.
Burduja made the announcement on Monday (18 March) while visiting the future location of the SMR – a former coal plant site in southeastern Romania, anticipating an investment cost of €5.5 billion for the 462MW plant.
SMRs are a new nuclear technology which to date has only been deployed in Russia and China. By producing smaller and more standardised reactors, the industry hopes to reduce the cost of new nuclear energy projects.
The project is being developed by the Romanian public-private partnership Ro-power, who identified in 2021 American company ‘NuScale’ as the likely provider of the SMR technology. If the schedule is maintained, the project would be the first in the world to deploy NuScale’s technology.
The US Ambassador in Romania, Kathleen Kavalec, pledged $4 billion of financial support for the project from the US government, saying that this commitment “underscores our shared commitment to a sustainable energy future”.
NuScale announced in November 2023 that they would terminate a US pilot project based on the same technology, citing a lack of “subscriptions to count towards deployment”. Before being terminated, the US project was estimated to have a ($9bn) price tag.
RoPower said at the time that it maintained its confidence in SMR technologies.
Minister Burduja defended Romania’s nuclear push, saying that “nuclear energy means energy with zero emissions, it means safe energy”.
The project is expected to generate more than 2,000 new jobs during the construction period and more than 230 permanent jobs to operate the plant, plus thousands more jobs in related industries.
Romania currently has one nuclear plant in operation in Cernavodă, near the Black Sea, which produces 33% of the total energy in Romania.
