Uniper Venture Builds Test Reactor at Swedish Nuclear Plant

A venture between Uniper SE and Sweden’s Blykalla AB has started work on a test reactor, the latest sign that the nation’s nuclear renaissance is gathering pace.

Author of the article:

Bloomberg News

Lars Paulsson

Published Jan 20, 2025  •  2 minute read

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(Bloomberg) — A venture between Uniper SE and Sweden’s Blykalla AB has started work on a test reactor, the latest sign that the nation’s nuclear renaissance is gathering pace. 

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The small plant on the site of Uniper’s Oskarshamn atomic power station will be Sweden’s first reactor in more than 40 years. With power demand poised to surge in coming decades, the government sees the controversial technology as one of the main answers to boost supplies. 

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“It’s a milestone for our company, and also a milestone for Sweden,” Blykalla Chief Executive Officer Jacob Stedman said in an interview. The facility will be ready by this summer, with tests set to commence in the third quarter, he said.  

The plant is being built by Swedish Modular Reactors AB — a 50-50 joint venture between the German power giant and Blykalla. 

The unit won’t produce any power and won’t be loaded with nuclear fuel. Instead, the purpose is to shine a light on various processes, including safety features, that will be applied to a lead-cooled version of a small modular reactor — or SMR — that Blykalla is currently designing. 

The firm aims to submit an application for the SMR in about a year’s time, Stedman said. It could then be up and running at the turn of the decade. 

The first nuclear SMR would have a capacity of about 70 megawatts. That’s much smaller than the nation’s six current reactors, which are all above 1,000 megawatts. The next stage would be a series of 140-megawatt units. 

Blykalla has so far raised about 300 million Swedish kronor ($27 million) for the test reactor, including 100 million from the state, Stedman said. The firm will continue to raise funds this year. 

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New reactors were a key 2022 election pledge and the center-right coalition is going all in with a goal to have several new reactors online by the middle of next century. 

But it’s a huge gamble given how technologies such as solar and wind continue to get cheaper, and critics argue that energy storage and other rapidly developing technologies could balance weather-dependent power sources.

“The challenge with new nuclear is that it takes a very long time to build and historically it’s been extremely expensive. But with our SMRs, we have a solution that will be much cheaper and quicker,” Stedman said. 

For Uniper, which operates the Oskarshamn-3 reactor and also has stakes in other Swedish atomic units, the role in the venture is not primarily to build new nuclear capacity, Swedish head Johan Svenningsson said in an interview. 

The company is currently owned by the German state, which has closed down the country’s own reactors and executives have repeatedly ruled out investing in new Swedish atomic plants. But the firm is attracting interest as Germany looks at various ways of exiting its holding. 

“We entered the partnership to help boost the SMR technology and the possibilities it offers for new nuclear capacity, but more to stimulate research and development, which is something we need also for the existing assets,” he said. 

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