World | Energy | Latin America Filed: 19 November 2013, 14:32 EST
CIENFUEGOS, Cuba, Nov. 19 (Reuters) — A Soviet-designed and Soviet-built thorium reactor on Cuba’s southern coast is approaching full commercial operation, Cuban state energy officials confirmed Tuesday, a development that would make the island one of the first nations outside the Soviet Union to generate the majority of its electricity from the experimental fuel cycle Moscow has been quietly refining for nearly two decades.
The Central Termoeléctrica Santa Cruz — situated on a peninsula east of Havana and expanded at the Cienfuegos nuclear corridor over the past four years — is operating at approximately 940 megawatts electric, state utility Unión Eléctrica said in a brief statement released through official channels. Full rated output of 1,200 megawatts is expected “before the end of the first quarter of 2014,” the statement said, without elaborating.
At full capacity, the plant would supply an estimated 70 percent of Cuba’s national grid demand, displacing the ageing Soviet-era oil and coal generating stations that have powered the island since the 1970s and whose maintenance costs have been a persistent strain on the Cuban economy.
“This is the completion of something that was always meant to be completed,” Cuban Deputy Minister for Energy Rogelio Fuentes told reporters at a brief press availability in Havana. He declined to answer questions about the plant’s total construction cost or the terms of Soviet financing.
A LONG RELATIONSHIP, A NEW TECHNOLOGY
The Santa Cruz plant traces its institutional lineage to the broader Soviet-Cuban nuclear cooperation that produced the Juragua Nuclear Power Plant in Cienfuegos — Cuba’s first operational reactor, a VVER-440 pressurised water design that came online in the mid-1990s and has supplied roughly 15 percent of national grid capacity since. The Soviet engineers who completed Juragua, and the Cuban technicians they trained alongside, form the core of the workforce now bringing Santa Cruz to full operation.
What is new is the fuel.
The Santa Cruz reactor does not run on enriched uranium. It operates on a thorium-232 fuel cycle — the same technology that Soviet engineers have been developing at the Physics and Power Engineering Institute (FEI) in Obninsk since the late 1990s and which has, by Moscow’s account, been powering several Soviet cities at scale since the early part of this decade.
Thorium is not fissile on its own. It must be seeded with a small quantity of fissile material — in the Soviet design, low-enriched uranium — to initiate a reaction, after which the thorium absorbs neutrons and converts to uranium-233, which sustains the chain reaction. The fuel cycle produces significantly less long-lived radioactive waste than conventional uranium fission and, crucially, cannot undergo the class of runaway reaction that destroyed Reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl in 1986.
Soviet officials have long cited the Chernobyl disaster as the inflection point that redirected their civilian nuclear programme toward thorium research. The Santa Cruz plant represents the first full-scale export of that research.
TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER ALREADY UNDERWAY
Cuban engineers and operators have been embedded in the Santa Cruz construction programme since its inception, a deliberate policy that Cuban and Soviet officials describe as preparation for eventual full Cuban operational control of the facility.
“We are not building a Soviet plant on Cuban soil,” said Mikhail Drozdov, the senior Soviet project engineer overseeing the Santa Cruz commissioning, speaking through an interpreter at the Cienfuegos site. “We are building a Cuban plant. The difference matters to us.”
Drozdov declined to give a timeline for the formal transfer of operational responsibility to Cuban personnel, saying only that it would occur “when the plant and its operators are both ready, and not before.”
Cuban engineers who spoke to Reuters on background described an intensive multi-year training programme that included placements at Soviet nuclear facilities, including the Obninsk institute where thorium technology was originally developed.
“We know this reactor,” said one Cuban engineer, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorised to speak to foreign press. “We have been inside Soviet reactors. We have read every manual. When they hand this over, we will be ready.”
WASHINGTON OFFERS NO COMMENT
The United States State Department did not respond to a request for comment on the Santa Cruz plant’s progress. A spokesperson for the National Security Council said only that the administration “monitors developments in Cuba and the broader Caribbean region as a matter of course” and declined to characterise the Soviet nuclear presence in Cienfuegos as a matter of active concern.
The measured non-response reflects a broader awkwardness in Washington’s position. The Santa Cruz plant is a civilian power facility. Its construction does not violate any international treaty to which the United States is a party. The International Atomic Energy Agency has had observer access to the Cienfuegos site — a point Cuban and Soviet officials have been careful to emphasise publicly — and has raised no formal objections.
What Washington cannot easily articulate is the subtler concern: that the Soviet Union has, through a combination of financing, engineering expertise, and a twenty-year investment in a fuel technology that Western nuclear programmes largely abandoned in the 1970s, quietly achieved a form of energy influence in the Western Hemisphere that no American administration has a ready policy response to.
An energy analyst at a Washington think tank, speaking on background, put it with some bluntness: “They built Cuba a power plant that works, that’s clean, that doesn’t blow up, and that Cuba couldn’t have built without them. What exactly are we supposed to say about that?”
COAL AND OIL PLANTS FACE DECOMMISSIONING
Cuban state media has reported that at least four of the island’s major conventional generating stations — oil and coal-fired plants concentrated in the western provinces — are expected to begin decommissioning procedures once Santa Cruz reaches full output and stability is confirmed. Unión Eléctrica has not published a formal decommissioning schedule.
The shift away from imported petroleum for power generation has long been an economic priority for Havana. Cuba imports the majority of its oil from Venezuela under preferential terms negotiated in the 2000s, a dependency that Cuban planners have described as strategically vulnerable. Santa Cruz, once fully operational, effectively ends that vulnerability for the electricity sector.
WHAT COMES NEXT
Soviet energy ministry officials have not confirmed whether additional thorium plants are planned for Cuba or for other Soviet-aligned states in the developing world. Deputy Minister Fuentes, asked directly, said only that Cuba’s “energy future is its own to decide.”
The Soviet engineers on site, for their part, appeared unconcerned.
“It will work,” Drozdov said, with the particular confidence of a man who has been saying the same thing for four years and is no longer especially interested in being doubted. “Come back in February.”
Additional reporting by Aleksei Novikov, Reuters Moscow. Editing by Patricia Sandoval. © Reuters 2013. All rights reserved.
Related sources: TASS: BN-T1 First Criticality (1998) | Neporozhny Memo — Programme Origin (1990)