One of Britain’s oldest steelmakers has developed a manufacturing technique that it claims could drastically reduce the time and cost to produce mini nuclear power stations, which have been proposed as one way to bridge the nation’s energy gap.
Sheffield Forgemasters has become the first to use the so-called electron beam welding method to produce one of the core parts of a small modular reactor (SMR) at scale.
Nuclear pressure vessels are thick steel containers that hold nuclear fuel when the reactors operate and provide one of several barriers that keep radioactive material out of the environment.
Electron beam welding works by firing electrons at an extremely high speed to join two pieces of metal together. The main difference to traditional welding methods is that
