Korea Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering, the intermediate holding company of HD Hyundai, is to invest US$ 30m in Terra Power, a small modular reactor (SMR) company founded by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
Through this contract, Korea Offshore & Shipbuilding plans to start investing in next-generation energy technology in earnest. Terra Power is an innovative company established in 2008, to develop next-generation reactor design technology sodium (Natrium, sodium cooling method). Tera Power’s technologies, such as sodium-cooled high-speed reactors and molten salt reactors, not only do emit no greenhouse gases during power generation, but also have a lower risk of accidents such as leaks and explosions compared to large-scale nuclear power plants.
Korea Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering plans to utilise HHI’s nuclear power capabilities in the future to explore new business opportunities, and in the long term, it plans to preoccupy future technologies in offshore nuclear power generation and nuclear-powered ships. HHI has been developing its technological capabilities for next-generation energy sources by participating in the development of key core facilities for the Korean-style fusion research system (KSTAR) and the International Fusion Experimental Reactor (ITER).
