A UK-headquartered international design company, Bryden Wood, is
working with TerraPraxis, a non-profit organization focused on action for
climate and energy, on a ‘Repowering Coal’ initiative to help countries
meet net-zero emissions targets by replacing coal-fired boilers at existing
power plants with Generation IV advanced modular reactors (AMRs).
Bryden Wood has created a new design and construction solution that the
group says would make such a program possible at scale and speed, in part
by deploying a new digital platform.
‘We’ve developed a new, standardized and optimized approach that’s
completely different to previous infrastructure thinking,’ Martin Wood, co-
founder of Bryden Wood, told POWER. ‘We’re building the market for
AMRs at the same time as the product itself is being developed. The digital
tools we’re creating will enable us to have a huge number of projects,
across multiple sites, ready to go as soon as the reactors are approved.
Speed and agility have never been so important.’
Bryden Wood, in addition to joining with TerraPraxis, is working with the
University of Buffalo, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Microsoft,
and KPMG to standardize and optimize processes, along with building and
engineering systems. The groups said the project to replace coal units with
small reactors would first be deployed in the U.S.
Kirsty Gogan, founder and managing partner of TerraPraxis, told POWER,
‘By sustaining permanent high-quality jobs for communities, repowered
coal plants reduce the negative impacts on communities to public and
political support for a just transition. The challenge is not only to build
enough clean electricity generation to power the world, but to do so quickly
while building the infrastructure required to decarbonize end-use sectors
such as heat, industry, and transport.’
Many coal plants have been retrofitted to burn natural gas over the past
decade-plus; a repowering with nuclear technology presents new design and
regulatory challenges.
‘Coal plants vary widely and developing a new design for each plant would
be complex, costly, and slow,’ said Wood. ‘Rather than thousands of
individual projects, we must have a unified approach where the design is
simplified and standardized to make this plan a reality as quickly as