WASHINGTON – The scalability of advanced reactor technologies is the next milestone for the nuclear industry, multiple industry representatives and officials told a House Science subcommittee on Energy Wednesday.
Joe Hoagland, the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory associate director for fission and fusion science, said during the hearing that the DOE’s reactor pilot program proved that public and private partnerships could accelerate nuclear innovation. Hoagland said that with the demonstration phase coming to a close, scalability has to be the priority through standardization and strengthening the supply chain.
“The next step is to scale,” Hoagland said in response to a question by Rep. Jeff Hurd (R-Colo.). “Taking all of the fundamental information, engineering, [and] science that has been learned and now that has to scale in the next step to an actual deployable plan.”
Hoagland said that with a scalable plan available, companies can build out a supply chain and ultimately move towards standardization.
Hurd questioned what is the bottleneck to commercially scaling advanced reactors at this point in time. To this, Isaiah Taylor, Valar Atomics CEO, said it was the supply chain, particularly the broader manufacturing supply chain that is affecting many U.S. industries.
Taylor also said the advanced nuclear fuel supply chain was an area of concern in regards to scaling.
“The next big blocker on our roadmap is fuel,” Taylor said. “We [Valar] are making our fuel to scale as fast as we can but we would love to see more enrichment come along. If we’re going to go from the 90 gigawatts that we have in the United States today into the couple of hundreds, we’ll need more fuel and more enrichment.”
Rep. Mike Kennedy (R-Utah) asked Taylor about the biggest challenge to scaling at military installations. Taylor told the Utah lawmaker that the advanced nuclear sector needs to move faster on deploying reactors at military installations. He said that rapid iteration is vital to technological development, safety and cost reduction.
“Being able to quickly turn things on, test them, learn from them, redesign and test them again is really where safety comes from and where cost-effectiveness comes from as well,” Taylor told Kennedy. “So, we would urge Congress to think in shorter timelines and to think in more iterations and that’s really what’s going to allow us to scale.”