22 December 2022

Inspection and certification company Bureau Veritas (BV) recently signed an agreement with nuclear power technology developer ThorCon for the Technology Qualification and subsequent development of a 500MW molten salt nuclear power barge intended for operations in Indonesia. Thorcon has been promoting its technology to key Indonesian institutions since 2015, the year that, Indonesia decided to cancel its $8bn plans to construct four nuclear plants with a total capacity of 6GWe by 2025.

In 2014, Thorcon’s parent company Florida-based Martingale, completed the preliminary detailed design of its molten salt reactor, technical details of which were published at thorconpower.com “It is the basis for securing feedback, funding, and siting for the project,” it said, adding that “the goal for 2015 is to identify a host country and site for construction of the non-nuclear prototype ThorCon, along with funding to enable construction”. In January 2015 Martingale formally unveiled its ThorCon liquid-fuel nuclear reactor design, which uses uranium and thorium fuel dissolved in molten salt, and these same details are now available on the Thorcon website. At that time, production was expected to start by 2020.