The former SNC-Lavalin group has won a contract with a laboratory of the United States Department of Energy to support the development of nuclear fusion technology. The company, renamed AtkinsRéalis in September 2023, takes the lead in a consortium of American engineering companies made up of Jacobs Technology and Longenecker & Associates.
Lasting five years, the maximum value of this contract is estimated at 50 million US dollars.
AtkinsRéalis and its partners are to support the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in developing experiments and upgrading the National Spherical Torus Experiment, a facility that tests thermonuclear physics principles .
No nuclear fusion technology, a process different from fission used in nuclear power plants, is currently commercialized. The process consists of uniting two light atomic nuclei to form a single, heavier one. The fusion of these two atoms releases a large quantity of energy. Fusion reactions occur in a state of matter called plasma, a type of charged gas at high temperature made up of positive ions and free electrons.
Research to develop — and eventually market — nuclear fusion technologies has intensified in recent years.
Two reasons mainly explain this interest. First of all, the International Energy Agency (IAEA) recalled this fall, “fusion could generate four times more energy per kilogram of fuel than fission and nearly four million times more energy than the burning of oil or coal. What’s more, nuclear fusion technologies would be safer and “should not produce high-level or long-lived nuclear waste”, emphasized the IAEA.
“We believe that the commercialization of fusion energy is the key to deploying an abundant source of safe and clean energy that will power a “net zero” future,” an AtkinsRéalis spokesperson said by email at Duty.
In the fusion sector, this is the company’s first contract in North America; it was mainly present in Europe in this field until now. Thus, in the United Kingdom, the Montreal company is participating in a program aimed at designing and building a fusion energy plant on a commercial scale. “We provide specialist engineering services and strategic advice to the UK Atomic Energy Agency on several contracts to realize fusion energy,” said the spokesperson.
In France, AtkinsRéalis is participating with companies from 35 countries in the international experimental thermonuclear reactor project. The objective: to build the largest experimental nuclear fusion reactor in the world.