By Simon Johnson
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) -Swedish utility Vattenfall has selected Britain’s Rolls-Royce SMR and U.S. group GE Vernova as candidates to supply a series of small modular nuclear reactors, it said on Thursday.
Sweden’s parliament in May passed legislation to finance a new generation of reactors, the first built in Sweden for more than 40 years and which the government says is necessary for energy security and achieving net zero emissions by 2045.
Vattenfall plans to order either five BWRX-300 reactors from GE Vernova or three Rolls-Royce small modular reactors (SMRs), which will be built at Vattenfall’s existing Ringhals plant in southwest Sweden to provide a total output of around 1,500 MW.
Rolls-Royce said each of its SMRs would generate enough electricity to power a million homes for more than 60 years.
Vattenfall said it is also considering building an additional 1,000 MW to replace two decommissioned reactors at Ringhals.
After looking like a doomed technology after nuclear accidents at Chernobyl in Ukraine and Fukushima in Japan, nuclear power has been undergoing a revival.
Sweden had previously voted, in 1980, to phase out its reactors. It now plans at least 2,500 MW of nuclear capacity by 2035 and has promised the first “spade in the ground” before the country votes in a general election in September next year.
“It’s not a question now of whether we will build more nuclear power but how fast and how much,” Deputy Prime Minister Ebba Busch told a news conference held near the Ringhals plant.
In total, the government wants the equivalent of around 10 new, full-size reactors by 2045.
Electricity demand in Sweden is expected to double to around 300 terrawatt-hours over the next two decades, the government says, due in part to new industries like green steel, bio-fuels and large-scale hydrogen production.
A white paper published last August said the state may need to lend nuclear developers between 300 billion and 600 billion crowns ($31-63 billion) with fixed prices for 40 years.
Critics say nuclear power will be too expensive and too slow to build.
Sweden has six operational reactors, all of which were built in the 1970s and 1980s. Electricity production is already almost entirely fossil-free, with hydropower accounting for around 40% of output, nuclear 30% and wind 20%.
(Reporting by Anna Ringstrom, Simon Johnson, Niklas Pollard in Stockholm and Sam Tabahriti in London, editing by Terje Solsvik and Susan Fenton, Kirsten Donovan)
