The Department of Energy’s National Reactor Innovation Center (NRIC) and Purdue University’s Applied Research Institute have agreed to work together on new technologies aimed at lowering construction costs.
The collaboration will take place under NRIC’s Advanced Construction Technology Initiative, a program designed to demonstrate advanced reactor construction technologies and techniques, according to DOE’s Nov. 5 press release. The construction demonstration project itself will take place at Purdue University in Indiana.
“NRIC’s mission is to provide the nuclear industry with the initiatives, facilities, resources and capabilities needed to close the gaps that keep promising technologies from reaching commercialization,” NRIC Director Brad Tomer said in the release. “Construction risk associated with nuclear facilities has been one of the biggest obstacles in that journey, and we created ACTI [Advanced Construction Technology Initiative] to tackle that challenge head-on.”
NRIC, located at Idaho National Laboratory, said in the release this project will “demonstrate the construction of a scaled, steel-plate composite containment vessel and reactor building to generate real-world data on its constructability, quality and performance for future small modular reactor deployment.”
The Electric Power Research Institute and Nuclear Energy Institute will be participants in the project. NEI will provide regulatory and quality assurance assistance, while the Electric Power Research Institute will provide technical assistance in advanced welding and digital twin validation.
NRIC and Purdue University said this project will serve the purpose of addressing the current gap between research and development and commercial construction. The two entities work to figure out streamlined construction approaches as SMRs look to make its entry into the market.
Currently, the United States has no SMRs in commercial operation, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued two construction permits, one to TerraPower and another to the Tennessee Valley Authority, this year to allow the companies to build the advanced reactor technologies.
