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 reaching the economics of scale.“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 producing multiple units for 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.”
Some Democratic lawmakers questioned the panel on the inherent safety of advanced reactors and how they intend to use the economics of scale given the reduced workforce at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).
Taylor said during the DOE reactor pilot program, NRC staffers were there working with DOE and hopes through that experience NRC will be familiar with the advanced reactor designs early on.
When talking about advanced reactor technology’s safety, Hoagland told Rep. April McClain Delaney (D-Md.) safety is the utmost concern to the industry and it cannot afford to make a mistake when deploying any reactors. He said agencies, such as the Pentagon, DOE and NRC, are working together to ensure that advanced reactor technologies meet safety requirements and also looking to find ways to streamline safety analyses.
