The Energy Department announced Wednesday it is providing $30 million to U.S. companies seeking a breakthrough in developing smaller nuclear reactors.
The grant funding from the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program comes on top of $160 million the DOE distributed in October to two companies that intend to develop and construct small nuclear reactors that can be operational within five to seven years.
The new money is going to five additional companies for “risk reduction projects.” These projects are in their earliest phases with technical hurdles to overcome and remain farther away from being ready for deployment — some 10 to 14 years from now. All of the awards are cost-share agreements between the government and industry.
“This is a way to spread the funding around to reduce the risk for a few other projects to achieve success, supporting a diverse spectrum of designs, technologies, and applications,” Brett Rampal, nuclear team manager at the Clean Air Task Force, told the Washington Examiner.
The projects receiving new funding are Kairos Power’s Hermes Reduced-Scale Test Reactor, Westinghouse’s eVinci Microreactor, BWXT’s Advanced Nuclear Reactor, Holtec’s SMR-160 Reactor, and Southern Company’s Molten Chloride Reactor Experiment.
Congress established the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program as part of the fiscal year 2020 budget.
Small reactors have the support of the Trump administration and bipartisan majorities in Congress. Policymakers of both parties hope that smaller, cheaper, and theoretically safer nuclear reactors will help balance out wind and solar to help combat climate change. Traditional large nuclear plants are struggling economically. Nuclear currently provides more power to the U.S. grid than any other zero-carbon emitting source.
“Nuclear is a critical component to having a carbon reduction strategy,” said Alice Caponiti, deputy assistant secretary for reactor fleet and advanced reactor deployment in the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy. “Having this pipeline of advanced reactors is critical to future deployment,” she told reporters on a press call.
President-elect Joe Biden has also signaled support for new forms of nuclear power to help the United States reach its goal of having carbon-free electricity by 2035 and net-zero emissions across the economy by 2050.
He proposes creating a clean energy innovation office within the Department of Energy, dubbed ARPA-C (the “C” stands for climate), that would in part seek to enable small nuclear reactors to reach half the construction cost of today’s reactors.
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.
The winners of the DOE’s demonstration program offer different types of nuclear technologies, providing for more options to guard against failure. The risk reduction projects receiving funding include a salt-cooled solid reactor, a small modular light-water reactor, two even smaller micro reactors that would be capable of providing power to remote communities, and a liquid salt-fueled fast reactor.
The DOE will distribute the $30 million among the five projects, with the amount for each to be determined depending on need. The funding only lasts one year, but the program is set up to invest $600 million over seven years, subject to additional appropriations by Congress.
