Approaches to achieve plant transportability and rapid site assembly

Approaches to achieve plant transportability and rapid site assembly 

Having eschewed an economy of scale cost reduction approach at the outset, two broad strategies to recover economic benefit are employed across the board by designers of small reactors without on-site refuelling  

Protective shell on the harge-mountedKLT-20 (8), see ANNEX VIfor details. 

The first approach is intended to benefit from learning curve and mass production efficiencies to achieve cost reductions for standardized modules in a factory environment. The second is intended to dramatically slash the customer s cost of interest on capital financing during site assembly and to hasten faster achievement of a revenue stream. Different designers approach these goals in several ways. 

At one extreme (the icebreaker reactor derivatives), the entire power plant is factory built on a barge which is towed to the customer s mooring site, anchored in a pre-prepared lagoon, and connected to a pre-installed power grid switchyard. Trans-ocean shipping times (6 days for the Atlantic, 10 days for the Pacific) are so short that the logistics time interval for this class of plants could be no more than several months. Crew training and physical start-up tests are minimized because factory start-up tests are run and a trained Russian crew is assumed to arrive with the plant. 

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