Selection Criteria

Safety is the starting point for anything we do at ULC-Energy. With the Dutch authority for nuclear permitting, the ANVS, we have a formidable department that houses specialists on nuclear technology especially related to safety.

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ULC-Energy focuses for the deployment of SMRs in on commercially proven reactor technology and proven fuel from credible vendors – this means light water reactors in the form of pressurised water reactors or boiling water reactors. Together these constitute the vast majority of operational reactors globally.

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At ULC-Energy we believe that advanced reactor technologies are exciting and promising based on their theoretical benefits. However, these technologies have at best been proven in research settings and have not been proven or deployed commercially. There are no established supply chains and procedures. There is no established fuel chain. There is little certainty how regulators internationally are going to consider these advanced technologies.

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We concluded that to pursue our objective to realise new capacity in The Netherlands we best choose something that we know, that has been optimised rigorously over the past 50+ years, with fuel we can purchase today if we want, with established supply chains. The industry will need to build out its manufacturing capacity, but we know what to do, what it will look like and how we can get the permits for what we want to do.

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Secondly the credibility of the technology vendor was a threshold criterium. There are several really smart SMR concepts but commercialising an SMR concept takes more than a smart idea. We looked specifically for those vendors that have the ability to scale up SMR production and bring manufacturing excellence right into the concept design.

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Subsequently we applied the following selection criteria.

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Modular – to ensure manufacturing process upside can be captured

Economics – a coherent strategy to ensure economic performance

Size – history has shown us the bigger Nuclear power plants were built the lower the unit cost of energy. We also simply need a lot of clean energy

Concept readiness – our aim is to deploy as soon as we reasonably can. We don’t want to rush. We were looking for concepts that were well thought through and advanced in readiness

Organisational priority – We wanted the SMR product to be an organizational priority of the vendor to ensure focus and commitment and avoid conflicts of interest

Fit for licensing – we wanted to avoid concepts that require a lot of explaining to regulators or contain significant elements of technology innovation as these can lead to licensing uncertainty

Turnkey contract – we believe the best product will be one where vendor and customer are aligned in the success of the project. Vendors that incorporate the concept of a turnkey contract – ie the vendor makes a real commitment to deliver the power plant we want to build. This also included an assessment of the rationale how the vendor manages this risk.