A US bank that supports technology exports to international corporations is providing $98 million to develop a small modular reactor (SMR) project in Romania. The board of EXIM, the U.S. export-import bank, announced Oct. 2 approval of a final commitment to a pre-project services loan for the SMR, which would utilize NuScale technology. Officials said the project, which would have an installed generation capacity of 462 MW, would utilize six modules of 77 MW capacity each. The plant is to be built on the site of a former coal-fired power plant in Doicesti, about 90 kilometers northwest of the capital Bucharest. The loan commitment comes after US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and other US and Romanian officials announced in July this year that Fluor Corp. and the Romanian company RoPower Nuclear have signed an agreement for the second phase of the Front End Engineering and Design Study (FEED) for the project. The first phase of the FEED study was completed at the end of 2023. RoPower is jointly owned by the state nuclear energy company Nuclearelectrica and Nova Power & Gas. Officials said the groups are working toward a commercial deployment of the SMR in 2029. The U.S. and Romania began working on the project in March 2019, when Nuclearelectrica and NuScale signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to study an SMR installation. NuScale and Nuclearelectrica signed an agreement in 2021 to commission a NuScale VOYGR-6 power plant in Romania by 2030. The two companies signed a memorandum of understanding in June 2022 to begin technical studies, technical reviews, and licensing and permitting activities for the project. Romanian officials said the conversion of the former coal-fired power plant site to nuclear power was part of the country’s “new vision of generation sources for the national energy system of the future.” Several countries – including the United States, Japan, the United Arab Emirates and South Korea – and companies (including Samsung C&T Corp. and Sargent & Lundy) are working to develop SMR installations in Romania. —Darrell Proctor is a senior editor for POWER (@POWERmagazine).