The US and Japan announced Thursday that the Japanese-American joint venture GE Vernova Hitachi would invest up to $40 billion in the construction of small nuclear reactors in the states of Tennessee and Alabama.
The bilateral collaboration will extend to the construction of gas exploration structures in the states of Pennsylvania and Texas, with respective values of US$17 billion and US$16 billion, according to a statement.
The informative text did not provide further details.
Created in 2007, GE Vernova Hitachi develops the BWRX-300 reactor, with a capacity of 300 megawatts (MW), when classical structures generally reach at least 900 MW.
It belongs to a new generation of small reactors, SMR, considered cheaper, capable of being built more quickly and with greater safety guarantees than previous ones.
For now, no SMR is operational in the USA and only a single project has been approved to date by the North American civil nuclear regulator, the NRC, that of the ‘start-up’ NuScale.
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