A Bermuda architectural firm has gone nuclear — but in a good way.

Cooper Gardner has designed the building for a revolutionary mini-nuclear power plant aimed at small and isolated communities.

And the sleek, low-rise design has won praise from Canadian-based StarCore Nuclear, which hopes to have the first of its power plants operational in four years.

John Gardner, of Cooper Gardner, said he and David Dabney, the co-founder of StarCore, had met in Annapolis, Maryland, when Mr Gardner bought Mr Dabney’s boat several years ago.

Mr Gardner said: “We became friends and what we do became useful for the start-up business he was working on.”

He added: “The thrust of the thing was at the stage we met, they hadn’t fully formed an image of how this would look.

“We had a conversation and he realised the value of design input into even a project like that.”

And Mr Gardner said: “It was a tremendous vote of confidence for us in an island where even a structure such as an airport or a courthouse or a school has to go to an overseas specialist.

“For an overseas entity, having enough confidence in a local company to design a nuclear power plant says a lot about how international entities see Bermudian talent.

“It’s a big lift to make it go from concept to reality.”

Mr Gardner added: “It’s a suitable scale for Bermuda, but I understand we may have some legislative barriers to even consider it.”

The small high temperature gas reactor, which is designed with fail-safe automatic control systems that are monitored by satellite from StarCore in Canada, is assembled in Canada and delivered in modular form.

The reactors are designed to be housed in silos buried deep underground, with an unobtrusive building to house maintenance and administrative staff, as well as an area where visitors can view its turbines through armoured glass.

Reactors would not be refuelled on-site and waste is not stored there either.

The fuel source, low enriched uranium pellets ingrained in a carbon matrix, cannot be used for nuclear weapons or so-called “dirty bombs”.

Mr Gardner said: “They were quite specific about what their requirements were and the programme.

“It’s problem-solving and when you are used to problem-solving with a building, you can come up with a number of suggestions.

“They were very open-minded — they wanted something progressive and it was a delight to work with that.”

Mr Gardner added: “We are part of a good team of people. There is a lot of engineering involved and we’re just doing our piece of a very complicated puzzle to the best of our ability and cross-checking it with people who have very specific requirements. It’s not an insurmountable thing to do.”

The sleek white structure, which looks like an upturned boat hull or a spaceship, is designed to blend into rural and isolated surroundings Mr Dabney said: “John is very creative and he is creative in many ways, not just from the architectural standpoint.

“When I found out what his work was, I thought I would love to get a design from him. When we saw it, we thought ‘this is it’.”

He added: “We wanted something with an extremely low profile, unobtrusive, but interesting to look at. There are no tall structures on it.

“It’s meant to blend into the landscape, yet if someone is up close, it’s aesthetically pleasing to look at.”

He added that large-scale nuclear power plants were huge, with tall towers.

Mr Dabney said: “We really wanted to have the opposite effect and Cooper Gardner understood that immediately.”

He added the unique design meant that, although the working parts of the reactor would be shipped in ready to put together, the building itself could be constructed locally.

He said: “The majority of the plant can be manufactured easily. It doesn’t require 100 different shapes and complex construction.

“We wanted an aesthetic feel, but from an engineering standpoint, it’s relatively simplistic.”

Mr Dabney said the timeframe for licensing a nuclear plant for production in Canada was “quite long” and that StarCore was in the process of getting its first licence in Canada.

He added: “We anticipate commission of the first plant in about four years.”

And he said there had been interest in the concept not only in Canada, but from Australia and Nigeria and that StarCore had just made submissions to Britain and Argentina.