Nuclear

DOE awards $22 million to promising nuclear technologies

Two award recipients aim to expand clean hydrogen with nuclear power.
DOE awards $22 million to promising nuclear technologies
(Image by Markus Distelrath from Pixabay )

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded $22.1 million to ten projects aimed at accelerating current and advanced nuclear reactor deployments.

These include two aimed at expanding clean hydrogen and one focused on bringing a microreactor design closer to deployment. The other projects intend to tackle nuclear regulatory hurdles, improve operations of existing reactors, and facilitate new advanced reactor developments.

This is the final round of awards DOE is making through the Office of Nuclear Energy’s industry funding opportunity announcement (iFOA). Since 2018, the iFOA has invested more than $230 million into 48 projects from 31 different companies across 18 states. To date, 28 of the selected projects have successfully been completed.

Traditional and advanced nuclear reactors could be well-suited to provide the constant heat and electricity needed to produce clean hydrogen. This could also open up new markets for nuclear power plants.

The hydrogen project teams selected for DOE awards include:

  • General Electric, which will scale-up co-electrolysis technology to produce a carbon-neutral aviation fuel and demonstrate a conceptual design with an advanced nuclear reactor.
  • Westinghouse, which will carry out a series of engineering studies that will provide insights on coupling hydrogen technology with existing nuclear reactors.

Other teams selected for funding include:

  • X-energy, which will complete a preliminary design of a microreactor to advance design elements and bring it closer to commercial deployment.
  • The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), which will demonstrate advanced manufacturing of small modular reactor components to support the U.S. supply chain.
  • 3M, which will develop an isotope recovery process to enable commercial deployment of molten salt reactors.
  • Constellation, which will improve operational efficiency and flexibility of the current fleet of nuclear reactors.

The last four selected project teams will breakdown regulatory hurdles: 

  • RhinoCorps will create a roadmap to help reactor licensees assess defensive strategies and incorporate modeling and simulation into their security assessment processes.
  • Analysis and Measurement Services Corporation will develop a blueprint that reduces maintenance costs and outage time for the current fleet of nuclear reactors.
  • General Atomics will support accelerated fuel testing efforts to license new fuel types needed by advance reactor developers to deploy their technologies.
  • Terrestrial Energy will submit pre-licensing topical reports to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to advance the development of its molten salt reactors and reduce regulatory risk for advanced reactors. 

More information on the award recipients can be found here.

Tags