Doosan Enerbility to Manufacture Key Reactor Module for NuScale Power’s SMR Project - Korea IT Times

Doosan Enerbility, a South Korean engineering firm, has secured a contract to manufacture a key reactor module for NuScale Power's small modular reactor (SMR) project. NuScale is developing a 77-megawatt pressurised water reactor design that has received design certification from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Doosan will produce the reactor vessel and internals at its facility in South Korea.

Where this fits

This contract demonstrates that SMR manufacturing supply chains are beginning to solidify outside China. Unlike solar panels, battery cells, and inverters, which are heavily concentrated in Chinese production and dependent on Chinese mineral processing, nuclear manufacturing is distributed across allied industrial economies: South Korea, Japan, France, Canada. This matters for sovereignty. A firm, low-emission generation technology is being built on a supply chain that runs through allied nations rather than through a strategic competitor. For Australia, which is locked into renewable imports from China and constrained by law from building nuclear capacity, this represents a path not available.

What it means

NuScale's progress shows that SMR technology is moving from prototype to commercial manufacture. The reactor design is proven; production capacity is being established. Australia's renewable transition, by contrast, assumes an indefinite supply of Chinese-made panels and batteries, processed with Chinese-controlled mineral inputs, while the one firm, low-carbon technology that could replace both coal and gas is prohibited by law. The cost of that legal constraint is not a choice between two paths of equal merit. It is a choice to exclude the technology with the shortest supply chain to allies and the lowest material intensity per unit of firm capacity delivered.