The Energy Department announced Tuesday it is providing $160 million to two U.S. companies building smaller advanced nuclear reactors that can be operational this decade.
“The awards are the first step of a new program that will strengthen American leadership in the next generation of nuclear technologies,” said Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette.
The DOE is awarding an initial round of funding through its first-of-a-kind Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program to TerraPower and GE Hitachi for its Natrium project, along with X-energy. Each recipient will receive $80 million as part of cost-share agreements between the government and industry that aim for the companies to build two reactors that can be operational within seven years.
Congress appropriated $160 million for the fiscal year 2020 budget as initial funding for the program. The DOE plans to invest a total of $3.2 billion over seven years for demonstration projects, subject to the availability of future appropriations.
The announcement is a significant step toward proving that small nuclear reactors, an emissions-free technology of a type that has never been deployed, can play a role in decarbonizing the grid.
“This is an opportunity to really see accelerated deployment of advanced reactor technology,” Brett Rampal, nuclear team manager at the Clean Air Task Force, told the Washington Examiner.
Small reactors have the support of both the Trump administration and bipartisan majorities in Congress. Both sides hope that smaller, cheaper, and theoretically safer nuclear reactors will help balance out wind and solar to help combat climate change.
“We need to find new, less expensive ways of making nuclear,” said Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who joined Brouillette at a press conference in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, announcing the grant winners.
There are dozens of advanced reactors proposed by U.S.-based companies in various stages of development, according to the Energy Department. But so far, only one, NuScale’s light-water reactor, has received design approval from the Nuclear Energy Regulatory Commission.
Another company, Oklo, which is building an even smaller “micro” reactor, recently produced the first nuclear design that does not use water as a coolant to have its application accepted by the NRC.
The winners of the DOE’s demonstration program offer different types of nuclear technologies, providing for more options to guard against failure.
Washington-based TerraPower, a nuclear technology firm co-founded by mega-billionaire Bill Gates, is collaborating with GE Hitachi to build small advanced reactors that can store excess energy in tanks of molten salt, to help supplement renewables, which provide power only intermittently. When power demand is low, heat produced by the reactor would be stored in molten salt tanks that could later be used to supplement wind and solar in periods of high demand.
The plants would be cooled by liquid sodium.
X-energy, based in Maryland, is building high-temperature gas-cooled reactors that can provide flexible electricity as well as heat for industrial applications.
“Putting all of our eggs into one technology basket offers one opportunity for failure and another for success. More solutions offer more opportunities for failure but also a lot more opportunities for success,” Rampal said.
