“Tech company signs a deal with a nuclear plant” is basically its own genre now. You’ve read a few of them, and they tend to land the same way: somebody needs electricity for AI, a reactor needs money, and everybody puts out a statement about the future of clean energy. Google signed another one in Finland on September 9, and I nearly scrolled straight past it.<\/p>\n
Then I looked at what’s happening inside the plant this month, and that turned out to be the good part.<\/p>\n
The plant is Loviisa, on the southeastern coast of Finland, about 62 miles from Helsinki. It’s been in its annual maintenance outage since August 2 and it won’t be fully back until October 18, which is a long one even by its own schedule. Fortum, the utility that owns it, takes the two units down one at a time so one of them keeps generating. While a unit is down, crews are pulling the casings and the internals out of its low-pressure turbines.<\/p>\n
All eight of them are being replaced.<\/p>\n
About 38 megawatts, and Fortum expects them to be live in 2028. The plant puts out 1,014 megawatts today from two reactors of 507 megawatts each, so the upgrade is worth roughly 3.7% more electricity.<\/p>\n
The reactors get none of the credit. This is the part I’d want explained if I were reading it cold, so here it is: a nuclear plant has two halves, and only one of them is nuclear. The reactor boils water. The steam runs down into the turbine hall, spins a high-pressure turbine and then a set of low-pressure ones, and whatever energy the blades fail to catch on the way through ends up as warm seawater. Sharpen the blades and the tolerances, and you catch more of the same steam.<\/p>\n
Fortum says the modernization is limited to the turbine island and has no impact on reactor operations or nuclear safety. The reactor keeps making the same heat it makes now. The plant just wastes less of it.<\/p>\n
Over the current license period, that moves Fortum’s expected generation from 170 terawatt-hours to 177. The work is being delivered by Doosan \u0160koda Power, the Czech turbine builder that also supplied Loviisa’s high-pressure turbines in an earlier round of this, and it’s being fitted in stages during the 2026, 2027 and 2028 outages.<\/p>\n
Adding capacity by machining better parts for a plant you already own is an unglamorous way to do it. It’s also, I’d guess, a fair bit cheaper per megawatt than anything anyone is building from scratch in Europe right now.<\/p>\n
The turbines are the headline job, but there are more than ten major projects packed into this outage, and around 1,000 contractor workers on site to get through them.<\/p>\n
Valmet, a Finnish company, is replacing the turbine protection and control systems on both units along with the actuators that carry out their instructions. The generator auxiliary systems are being modernized at the same time, which gives the control room live monitoring it didn’t have before.<\/p>\n
Then there are the pumps. Each unit has four main seawater pumps, so eight in total, and Andritz of Austria is replacing the lot. Those pumps push cold Baltic water through the condensers, where the steam that has already been through the turbines gets chilled back into water and sent around the loop again. Fortum says the existing pumps and motors are approaching the end of their technical life.<\/p>\n
None of that adds a megawatt on its own. All of it has to work for the 38 megawatts to show up.<\/p>\n
Fortum’s stated reason is partly age and partly supply. Some components are near the end of their technical life cycle, which makes spares harder to find. And the company says changes in the operating environment and geopolitical developments have increased uncertainty about support and spare parts from some of the original equipment suppliers.<\/p>\n
Fortum doesn’t name a country in that sentence, and I don’t think it needs to. Loviisa’s two VVER-440 reactors, the turbines and the generators were bought from the Soviet Union. The safety systems, control systems and automation came from the West, and the steel containment and its ice condensers were built under Westinghouse licenses. It has been a hybrid machine since it was built, and the eastern half of the parts catalog got complicated.<\/p>\n
The fuel went the same way. Fortum has been loading Westinghouse-made assemblies into unit 2 during recent outages and is doing it again in this one, and in April it joined three other European utilities in an agreement with France’s Framatome to develop a fully European fuel for VVER-type reactors.<\/p>\n
Sasu Valkamo, who runs the Loviisa plant for Fortum, said the outage will “again ensure uninterrupted electricity production for the coming year.”<\/p>\n
Google’s agreement runs 22 years. It starts in 2028 with a smaller volume and scales to half of Loviisa’s capacity from 2030 through 2049, and it’s the company’s first nuclear power deal outside the United States. Alongside it, Google said it will put \u20ac13 billion, about $15 billion, into data centers and supporting infrastructure in Finland across 2027 and 2028, at Hamina, Muhos, Vaala and Kajaani. Loviisa sits about 34 miles from that Hamina campus.<\/p>\n
What Fortum gets is predictable revenue, and it needs some. The program to keep the plant running to 2050 is costed at about \u20ac1 billion, roughly $1.15 billion, and around 80% of the projects in it, worth some \u20ac700 million, still have no investment decision behind them. Fortum’s own line is that without the lifetime extension work, Loviisa couldn’t run past 2030 at all.<\/p>\n
The two reactors first pushed power into the Finnish grid in 1977 and 1980, and their original operating licenses ran out at the end of 2027 and 2030. The Finnish government relicensed both units to the end of 2050<\/a> in February 2023, which is why there’s anything here to extend in the first place.<\/p>\n Fortum hasn’t said, and I can’t find a hardware answer anywhere in the announcement. The company states that the deal is expected to enable a new 10 megawatt increase on top of the 38 already under way, and leaves it there. My guess is that it lands wherever the remaining \u20ac700 million of undecided projects lands, but that’s a guess and you should treat it as one.<\/p>\n The 38 megawatts are different. That work is contracted, the first casings are being fitted right now, and it doesn’t depend on anyone’s AI forecast holding up.<\/p>\n Fortum says the outage ends on October 18, the turbine work carries on through the 2027 and 2028 outages, and the extra 38 megawatts should be on the grid in 2028. The license it’s all aimed at expires at the end of 2050.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “Tech company signs a deal with a nuclear plant” is basically its own genre now. You’ve read a few of … <\/p>\nSo where does the extra 10 megawatts come from?<\/h2>\n