The Czech government (which controls power company CEZ) has chosen South Korea’s Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power (KHNP) to build up to four new gigawatt-scale reactors at the country's two existing nuclear sites, Dukovany and Temelin. KHNP beat out competitors EDF (France) and Westinghouse (USA). This announcement was interesting for several reasons.
First, there are very few open competitions or “beauty contests” for new reactor projects of this scope. The reason is simple. The Chinese, for example, rely on their own domestic companies for nuclear engineering and construction work, as do the French, Russians, Koreans and Americans—all nations with nuclear development and export programs.
As a result, there is very little real competition between nuclear designs or national vendors since the international market, apart from the nations already mentioned, is fairly limited. The Czechs entire nuclear fleet consists of two types of Russian VVERs built by Rosatom and they want to diversify vendors. if(window.
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