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B&W’s Jim Ferland describes company’s global business outlook

ByRod Adams

Jim Ferland, the CEO of The Babcock & Wilcox Company, was recently interviewed by Bill Loveless of Platts Energy Week about the company’s global business outlook.

During the interview, Ferland discussed the B&W mPowerTM reactor, one of the leading small modular reactor development projects; FutureGen 2.0, a carbon capture and storage demonstration project; the impact of increasing government regulations; and the company’s technology development programs.

Disclosure: I am employed by B&W as an engineer/analyst on the B&W mPower reactor development project.

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Rod Adams

Rod Adams is Managing Partner of Nucleation Capital, a venture fund that invests in advanced nuclear, which provides affordable access to this clean energy sector to pronuclear and impact investors. Rod, a former submarine Engineer Officer and founder of Adams Atomic Engines, Inc., which was one of the earliest advanced nuclear ventures, is an atomic energy expert with small nuclear plant operating and design experience. He has engaged in technical, strategic, political, historic and financial analysis of the nuclear industry, its technology, regulation, and policies for several decades through Atomic Insights, both as its primary blogger and as host of The Atomic Show Podcast. Please click here to subscribe to the Atomic Show RSS feed. To join Rod's pronuclear network and receive his occasional newsletter, click here.

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3 Comments

  1. Rod – thanks for the video. I love the statement at 1:55 about load following. I’m especially taken by the vision of a wind farm or solar installation putting in a SMR to remove variability, collecting ‘green’ subsidies to build the facility, and then collecting generous feed-in tariffs on what’s essentially nuclear energy. Hilarious!

    I’m curious about the load following ramp rates in the m-Power design. Are you at liberty to comment? I feel sure that the reactor and the generator have to be designed jointly and that there are many tradeoffs.

    Also – is there any discussion at B&W about modular reactors designed to fulfill Cal Abel and Jim Holm’s vision of replacing coal boilers with nuclear boilers in existing power plants?

    2. Andrew,
      You make an interesting point that I have never heard stated as concisely. Wind and solar installations, at present, are really just remote gas plants that occasionally cycle down (between 15% and 30%) to accommodate the unreliables.

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