Decarbonizing the most energy-intensive industries with a compact, competitive, flexible and strategically autonomous nuclear energy platform
Working closely with its industrial partners, HEXANA designs and develops a SMR energy platform whose first unit is scheduled to begin production from 2035 to decarbonize industrial processes and supply dispatchable electricity to the grid. Drawing on nuclear and non-nuclear technologies with significant track records in France and worldwide, HEXANA is strengthening its credibility across Europe, focusing on structuring its initiatives and rapidly scaling its platform toward industrialization.
With its power output and the services it offers, HEXANA addresses a precise market: large energy-intensive industrial sites in France and Europe.
HEXANA’s commercial strategy is built on a collaborative and rigorous approach. Ahead of any investment project, HEXANA conducts in-depth technical-economic and regulatory studies with its future clients, grounded in the realities of their industrial sites. The goal: to jointly validate the relevance of energy supply via an HEXANA platform before launching the project’s structuring phase. These case studies confirm the strong variability of industrial sites’ energy needs, and the necessity of offering a fully adaptable energy platform — whether in terms of power level, electricity-to-heat ratio, or supply flexibility enabled by the storage integrated into the HEXANA platform. They also confirm the relevance of bringing several industrial players together around a single SMR (Small Modular Reactor) platform project, both in terms of siting and on the economic, technical, regulatory, and acceptability fronts. While the platform’s nuclear island is standardized to achieve series-production savings, the HEXANA product meets clients’ flexibility needs across three dimensions:
HEXANA provides a concrete alternative to natural gas by producing dispatchable, decarbonized and competitive energy, suited to the continuous electricity and heat needs of chemical processes.
HEXANA collaborates with players covering all types of e-fuel production processes (RWGS, co-SOEC, methanolation).
HEXANA’s energy platform supplies heat up to 465°C, covering the needs of numerous steelmaking processes.
The HEXANA platform offers two key strengths for supplying multiple industrial sites: high power output (335 MW / 800 MWth) and modular electricity-heat cogeneration tailored to local needs.
The thermal storage integrated into the HEXANA platform can be used to rapidly produce electricity during demand peaks, or conversely to reduce electricity output during periods of high production thanks to heat storage.
HEXANA’s energy platform, with its thermal storage, is an asset for meeting flexibility and power supply needs, offering a response tailored to data centers’ requirements for redundancy and high power.
HEXANA aims for rapid deployment of its energy platform by choosing the most proven 4th-generation reactor technology, the sodium-cooled fast neutron reactor (SFR), backed by more than 400 cumulative years of operating experience, a very significant share of which comes from France with Rapsodie, Phénix and Superphénix.
With this in mind, HEXANA relies on proven technologies while incorporating carefully selected innovative systems. Above all, it is the overall vision that makes the difference: a platform designed as a coherent, modular and flexible whole, capable of adapting to the realities of each industrial site.
This approach is driven by a clear purpose: starting up a first industrial unit as early from 2035. This timeline rules out breakthrough innovations, particularly in fuel or core materials, whose qualification process would be too long and too uncertain to be compatible with this deadline.
Beyond the integrated reactor vessel concept, largely inherited from from French SFRs sector, the HEXANA energy platform draws on the operating experience of the concentrated solar power industry for its molten-salt thermal storage system, and on widely proven and optimized concepts for its energy conversion system, based on a conventional steam cycle. HEXANA’s right-sized innovation approach thus focuses primarily on:
HEXANA made systems engineering a structuring pillar of its project development.
The project organization is built on a matrix vision: a « product » vision, identifying the main systems overseen by architects, and a « cross-functional » vision, identifying key system performance areas overseen by dedicated leads.
Finally, a synthesis unit is tasked with driving the deployment of systems engineering and producing a synthesis model. Within this framework, HEXANA positions itself as the overall architect of its entire energy platform, acting as:
Industrialization is a flagship dimension of the HEXANA project, formally integrated as a cross-functional area within systems engineering. The objective of achieving first criticality of the first HEXANA module from 2035 onward requires combining historical operating experience with targeted innovations, analyzing critical components that require industrialization studies and early action, and identifying the most relevant supply chain and industrial organization to meet design, manufacturing and construction deadlines.
From the pre-project phase onward, HEXANA relies on a European ecosystem of competent, proven engineering firms, mobilized as lead system architects for HEXANA’s non-reactor systems.
Beyond these initial strategic partnerships, which are structuring for the future development phases of the HEXANA platform, the project already involves major players in the French and European supply chains to take part in the design and future industrialization of key components.
HEXANA structures its certification strategy around three pillars: integrating safety requirements from the design stage, regular exchanges with the French Nuclear Safety and Radiation Protection Authority (ASNR), and rigorous oversight of the process from the earliest project phases. The certification process defined by the ASNR is organized into four successive stages:
The certification schedule for HEXANA’s First-Of-A-Kind industrial unit thus follows the anticipated timeline for commissioning by around 2035.
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