Nuclear Futures Institute named as part of Advanced Modular Reactor (AMR) Feasibility and Development project

The UK Government’s Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy has announced recently that Bangor University’s Nuclear Futures Institute will be part of the £10M Advanced Modular Reactor (AMR) Feasibility and Development project led by Westinghouse.

As the country strives towards net Zero CO2 generation, nuclear energy is being pursued as one of the leading resources that provides reliable, sustainable, low CO2 baseload electricity.

AMRs represent a step-change in performance and safety that may also enable co-generation of resources (for example hydrogen or heating for industrial processes) making further strides to a net zero CO2 future through deep de-carbonisation.

Dr Simon Middleburgh will lead a small team at Bangor University to design, build and operate a facility that is able to test the behaviour of a range of in-core components and materials in flowing molten lead. This will enable materials selection to be performed in addition to accelerating licensing and testing of components.

The experimental work will be coupled with modelling efforts, providing a mechanistic understanding of the behaviour of the materials.

The Bangor team will be working closely with the other industry partners in the Westinghouse consortium, including at Jacobs and with the UK's National Nuclear Laboratory.

The award represents the growing influence that Bangor University is having in the region and beyond related to nuclear new build.

Importantly the project has provisions for a new post-doctoral role at Bangor University, which will be advertised soon, (Please contact s.middleburgh@bangor.ac.uk for details).

Publication date: 20 August 2020