Seven questions about the first authorization request for a mini-nuclear reactor in France
Will large French factories soon have their own nuclear power plants? The French start-up Jimmy officially submitted an authorization request for its small modular reactor on Monday April 29. The objective is to supply heat to the industrial complex of the Cristal Union / Cristanol sugar group, which produces alcohol and bioethanol in Bazancourt (Marne). These new players are taking advantage of government incentives to develop the sector, as part of the France 2030 program.
The role of this small modular reactor (PRM) will be to provide heat in the form of steam, around 450°C, replacing the plant’s current burners, which operate on gas. This PRM is notably composed of a high temperature reactor, in which nuclear fission takes place. “This is a completely different technology from the reactors in the current fleet”explains Sébastien Israel, head of the new reactor department at the Institute for Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN). “The fuel is so-called ‘triso’ particles: uranium oxide coated with three layers of material, which constitute beads of the order of a millimeter.” These are placed in graphite blocks. The helium present in the circulators conducts the heat to an exchanger, to which the plant is connected.
This 20 meter high cube will be installed directly on the industrial customer’s site. The Jimmy group ensures that its equipment has a life expectancy of twenty years, requiring recharging after ten years, and that each of the reactors helps avoid releasing up to 350,000 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. In the case of the Cristanol plant in Bazancourt, the power of the PRM would be 10 megawatts, 430 times less than the power expected for the Flamanville EPR.
Jimmy Energy is a young start-up founded in 2020 by a polytechnician, Antoine Guyot, and an HEC graduate, Mathilde Grivet. It is one of eleven “innovative nuclear reactor” projects which have won state aid as part of the France 2030 program. As such, Jimmy had benefited from 32 million euros, out of the 130 million allocated in this section. It also attracted around twenty million euros of private investment. These modules must be assembled on the Creusot site (Saône-et-Loire), where the group’s industrial platform is located. Jimmy submitted an authorization request last month to build his future assembly workshop there.
Fuel still represents an industrial challenge. “Large reactors use uranium fuel rods enriched to 3% or 4%, for which there are many producers, including the French Orano” (formerly Areva), notes Ludovic Dupin, information director of the French Nuclear Energy Company (Sfen). “But here, it is about producing more enriched fuels, at 20%, and in different forms”. Which will require the future creation of supply chains.
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