Norwegian utility Halden Kjernekraft is in talks to buy a plot of land for a power station made up of small modular reactors (SMRs).

If it goes ahead, it will be Norway’s first commercial-scale nuclear power station and one of the world’s first to use factory-built reactors.

Norsk Kjernekraft, which owns 40% of the company, said the facility was likely to be built in Halden, a town in southeast Norway close to the Swedish border. It may consist of four SMRs with a total installed capacity of 1.2GW.

Space will also be set aside for radioactive waste storage that can serve future nuclear plants in Norway and waste from Norway’s research reactors at Kjeller and Halden.

Norsk Kjernekraft chair Jonny Hesthammer said the Halden site could be suitable for data centres and other power-intensive industries.

The next phase will be to notify Norway’s Ministry of Energy and prepare for an “assessment programme”.

Halden Kjernekraft is also 20% owned by Halden municipality and 40% by electric utility Ostfold Energi. It was set up in November 2023 to investigate the construction of a plant using SMR technology.

The initiative to create an SMR site came from the municipality, which has more than 60 years of experience of hosting the Institute for Energy Technology’s nuclear fuel and materials testing reactor.

Halden is the fourth possible location announced by Norsk Kjernekraft for a nuclear power plant. The company is also involved in potential projects in Heim, in western Norway, Vardo in the far north of the country, and Oygarden, in the southwest.

Norway has never had commercial nuclear power plants, but has operated two research reactors for the production of medical radioisotopes and research.