French company proposes offshore nuclear power

DCNS, the state-owned submarine-building and nuclear engineering firm, plans to conduct a validation study on its designs for a small subsea power plant for supplying coastal regions with electricity.

The Flexblue plant would sit on the seafloor at a depth of 60m to 100m, a few kilometres off shore, and have an electrical output of between 50MW and 250MW. By comparison Sizewell B power station in Suffolk has an output of almost 1200MW.

The power plant’s design makes Flexblue resistant to tsunamis, earthquakes or floods and its underwater position makes it less vulnerable to terrorist attacks, the company told The Engineer.

Andre Kolmayer, the company’s vice president for civil nuclear, said: ‘One challenge of the Flexblue concept is to bring together two worlds – nuclear energy and naval shipbuilding.’

With the exception of the long-standing cooperation in nuclear propulsion systems for DCNS-designed warships for the French Navy, the worlds of nuclear energy and shipbuilding have followed essentially parallel paths.