Blue Energy, a nuclear power plant company, has secured USD 45 million in funding to further develop its modular nuclear power plant. Their system can be centrally manufactured in existing shipyards.
Shipyard manufacturing reduces the cost and build time of deploying nuclear power safely, making nuclear power economically competitive with fossil fuels and renewables. The funding will be used to advance Blue Energy’s core engineering work and site development, and secure additional partners.
To decarbonise and grow electricity production while maintaining energy affordability and security, the global energy generation mix must include more nuclear power. However, new nuclear plant construction projects face multi-year delays and exorbitant costs.
While there have been exciting advancements in nuclear reactor technology, reactors make up less than ten per cent of the cost of nuclear power plants; over ninety per cent of the cost comes from construction and regulatory challenges in the rest of the plant.
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Cheaper and faster
Blue Energy’s innovation is a modular, reactor-agnostic power plant architecture to house the next generation of nuclear reactors. Blue Energy’s power plants use centralised shipyard manufacturing to dramatically reduce the capital costs from USD 10K/kW to USD 2K/kW and shrink build times from ten years to two years.
‘Blue Energy is addressing the biggest obstacles to wide adoption of nuclear power: cost and build time,’ says Jake Jurewicz, CEO of Blue Energy. ‘Using the traditional approach, it takes thousands of workers several years to construct nuclear power plants on site. We’ve designed a modular plant that can be fully prefabricated centrally in shipyards and transported to its operating location. By moving nuclear power to preexisting assembly lines, Blue Energy is radically reducing build time and cost, making nuclear power cost competitive with fossil fuels and renewables.’
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Partnering with reactor vendors
Blue Energy is reactor agnostic, partnering with reactor vendors and designing modular power plants to house them. By partnering with reactor vendors, Blue Energy can leverage existing regulatory progress to further accelerate the time to market for their modular nuclear power plant.
Michael Kearney, General Partner at the Engine Ventures and Blue Energy board member: ‘By integrating with established reactor vendors, and existing centralised manufacturing techniques, the Blue Energy development platform unlocks low-cost economics that can rapidly scale to serve the growing demand for clean, firm power.’
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‘Simplifying the regulatory and operational path’
‘Decarbonised baseload is essential for a decarbonised grid and helps to address the capacity factor issues of solar and wind. Blue Energy addresses the core of rising nuclear costs by dramatically simplifying the regulatory and operational path while making use of the ready-to-scale reactor technologies,’ adds Tom Chi, General Partner at At One Ventures and Blue Energy board member. ‘The result will be impactful for addressing grid demand, optimising our renewables capacity, and providing high-reliability power to industry and to consumers.’
Blue Energy has signed a letter of intent with a datacenter and cloud provider to serve as the offtaker for the first plant.
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