Norway's Research Council Funds Nuclear-Propulsion R&D
A Norwegian research funding institute has decided to provide early-stage support to a nuclear propulsion startup featuring some of the best-known names in Scandinavian maritime technology.
The Research Council of Norway is giving $2 million in grant support to the Marine Nuclear Propulsion System (dubbed MarNuPS) project, led by the Norwegian subsidiary of American reactor company Emerald Nuclear.
Emerald Nuclear is a microreactor startup aimed specifically at ship and barge-based applications. It is run by a nuclear engineer with aerospace experience, and has a former Naval Reactors officer on its board. Like many modern microreactor designs, its "GEM" concept would run on TRISO coated uranium fuel pellets, with refueling via reactor swap-out at five to 15-year intervals. Its business plan is based on reactor leasing rather than sales, the firm told Alaska's KNOM earlier this year.
Other partners in the project include OSV operator Island Offshore, Emerald's first commercial customer; Fincantieri-owned specialty shipbuilder VARD and Vard Electro; NTNU, a leading center of shipping-technology research; Imperial College London; and machinery-monitoring firm Maskindynamikk.
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The grant contribution is a small component of the total project cost, expected to come to about $15 million in the first phase of research.
"This award is evidence of validation and momentum rather than the scale of the ambition," said Hallgeir Juliebø, Emerald's co-founder and CCO. "This support gives the program additional backing as we move from design and analysis towards building and testing a complete integrated system."
