Doosan Enerbility to Build Reactor Vessel for NuScale’s Flagship US Small Modular Reactor

South Korea’s Doosan Enerbility has signed a contract to manufacture the upper reactor pressure vessel (URPV) for NuScale Power’s small modular reactor (SMR), the company confirmed on October 29, marking its selection as the vessel manufacturer for what Korean trade press describes as the largest SMR project currently under development in the United States.

What Doosan will build

The upper reactor pressure vessel forms the top section of NuScale’s reactor vessel and houses the reactor coolant system, which must hold cooling water under high temperature and pressure during operation. Doosan will manufacture the component at its heavy-forging plant in Changwon, South Korea, the same facility that has supplied reactor vessel forgings and other large components for nuclear projects worldwide for decades.

The deal is the latest step in a manufacturing relationship between the two companies that dates back to 2019, when NuScale and Doosan signed an initial manufacturing consulting agreement. Doosan began forging-die preparation work for NuScale components in 2022, and NuScale placed its first long-lead-time material order for the upper reactor pressure vessel with Doosan in March 2023.

The project behind the order

NuScale’s first planned commercial deployment is the Carbon Free Power Project, developed for the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS) consortium at Idaho National Laboratory, with commercial operation targeted for 2029. The project is intended to deploy NuScale’s VOYGR SMR design, which uses multiple small reactor modules housed in a shared pool rather than a single large reactor vessel — the design feature that drives much of the interest from US utilities seeking smaller, incrementally deployable nuclear capacity to meet rising electricity demand.

Neither Doosan’s statement nor the independent Korean and trade press coverage reviewed for this article disclosed the dollar value of the new contract or a delivery date for the finished vessel component.

A long-running South Korean export role

Doosan Enerbility, formerly known as Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction, has built and exported large forged components for nuclear reactors for decades, including work tied to South Korea’s own APR1400 reactor fleet and export projects such as the Barakah plant in the United Arab Emirates. Its role in NuScale’s supply chain predates the latest order: beyond the 2019 manufacturing consulting agreement, NuScale has previously described Doosan as a planned source of certain forgings and reactor pressure vessel components for its first commercial modules, alongside domestic US suppliers the company has also lined up as it builds out manufacturing capacity for a design the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission certified in 2023, the first SMR design to receive that approval.

Part of a broader nuclear supply chain build-out

The NuScale order adds to a run of nuclear manufacturing and supply-chain announcements in late October, as component suppliers on both sides of the Pacific race to support a wave of new reactor orders. In the United States, Centrus Energy shipped its first domestically manufactured centrifuge to its Ohio enrichment plant the same week, part of a separate effort to rebuild the country’s nuclear fuel supply chain. South Korean industry has also faced setbacks elsewhere: Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power ended construction-contract talks with a Daewoo-Doosan consortium over the Czech Republic’s Dukovany project days earlier, though KHNP said Doosan’s separate equipment and turbine-generator supply contracts for that project, signed in December 2025, remain unaffected by the breakdown.

NuScale’s reactor design belongs to a broader category of advanced nuclear technology that regulators and utilities have increasingly focused on as a way to add nuclear capacity faster and in smaller increments than traditional large reactors; background on how the small modular reactor category works is covered separately.

Sources

• World Nuclear News, “Doosan to manufacture upper reactor vessel for NuScale SMR,” October 2026 — contract scope, component description and manufacturing location.
• Maeil Business Newspaper (mt.co.kr), October 29, 2026 — independent Korean-language confirmation of the contract and its description as the largest current US SMR project.

Illustrative image. Photo: IAEA Imagebank, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons — source