Kiewit Power Constructors Co. Joins Team Holtec with Mission to Make SMR-160 Commercially Competitive and Construction-Friendly

We are pleased to announce that Kiewit Power Constructors Co. of Omaha, Nebraska, a national leader in cost-competitive construction of combined cycle power plants, has joined Team Holtec as the latest member of a band of illustrious companies that includes Mitsubishi Electric (Japan and its U.S. subsidiary), SNC-Lavalin (Canada), Framatome (France and its U.S. subsidiary) and Exelon Nuclear (U.S.) dedicated to the renaissance of nuclear energy. Team Holtec has completed the candidate design of SMR-160 that has re-confirmed that the reactor will be unconditionally safe regardless of the accidents and challenges it might confront in its long (over 80-year) service life. 

“Having devised a walk away safe reactor, our next challenge is to make it cost competitive with the most economical present-day energy generation alternatives. We respect Kiewit’s trailblazing innovations in reducing construction cost and shrinking the project’s schedule, which we hope to leverage to our SMR-160 in full measure. We look forward to an enduring partnership with Kiewit, as our organizations share similar visions and values,” says Holtec Senior Vice President and Chief Nuclear Officer Pierre Oneid.

Kiewit’s Executive Vice President John Jennings offers, “Small modular reactors, like Holtec’s SMR-160, are a key part of the future of energy in our nation and around the world. We are pleased to add our expertise to the team and be aligned with Holtec on this journey, as they pave the way for a new generation of innovative solutions for the energy industry.”

The SMR-160 is a light-water based pressurized small modular reactor, which generates 160 MWe (525 MWth) and relies on the omnipresent and failure-proof gravity as the workhorse to operate all safety-significant systems. SMR-160 is often termed a universal reactor because it can be operated in any terrain, be it parched lands with little water such as the Arabian peninsula and America’s southwest, or coastal lands saturated with corrosive salt air, or the frigid expanse of the north Asia steppes. Having eliminated the risk of radioactivity release under any credible accident scenario, the SMR-160 plant, with its diminutive footprint (less than 5 acres), can be deployed deep within a well-populated metropolitan area. SMR-160’s universality is also reflected in the fact that any fraction of its output steam can be diverted from power generation to process steam for an industrial plant. Simplicity and ease of operation make it unnecessary for a country to deploy a platoon of nuclear engineers to run it. Virtually all capital equipment needed for SMR-160 will be manufactured at Holtec’s Advanced Manufacturing Division in Camden, NJ giving us a significant level of cost certainty. Satellite manufacturing plants in other SMR-160’s host countries are also planned.

“We have a sacred mission to offer clean and safe nuclear energy to a world that would suffocate with greenhouse gases with today’s dominant energy sources. With SMR-160, we are poised to reprise America’s original gift of nuclear technology to the world seven decades ago in a new transformative nuclear technology that guarantees safety and freedom from the threat of accidents,” says Tom Marcille, Holtec’s VP of Nuclear Technologies.