America’s Department of Energy (DoE) has named ten companies it will work with to test advanced atomic reactor projects outside of the agency’s world-famous national laboratories, in line with President Trump’s Nuclear Reactor Pilot Program.
The DoE announced the program in June, following a Trump Executive Order that revised the way reactor evaluation and testing is handled by the organization, claiming the Federal Government had “effectively throttled the domestic deployment of advanced reactors.”
In response, this latest initiative seeks to establish a pathway for the private sector to get in on the action, from advanced reactor demonstration through to fast-track commercial licensing.
In line with its goal of accelerating new nuclear power generators into service, the Reactor Pilot Program aims to have at least three test reactors fired up by July 4 next year – the 250th anniversary of America’s independence – and the DoE has now shortlisted 11 projects from the 10 companies that applied for authorization by the agency.
The ten firms include Aalo Atomics, Antares Nuclear, Atomic Alchemy, Deep Fission, Last Energy, Oklo (authorized for two projects), Natura Resources LLC, Radiant Industries, Terrestrial Energy, and Valar Atomics.
With DoE authorization under the Atomic Energy Act, the companies will be better placed to access private funding for their projects, the agency says, which will be constructed and tested at sites outside the traditional government institutions for atomic research, such as Los Alamos National Laboratory.
However, it is understood that only the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has the authority to license commercial nuclear power reactors, so the DoE scheme is effectively just to develop and demonstrate the viability of new designs.
The Trump administration is keen to get more nuclear power online as soon as possible, partly so that it can feed the country’s AI ambitions which are driving ever-expanding power-hungry datacenter infrastructure.
With this in mind, the DoE was also asked to come up with locations on the land occupied by its national laboratories where datacenters can be colocated with energy generation facilities, and has so far identified four sites where private sector entities will be invited to build.
The agency is also working with Westinghouse and Radiant Nuclear on so-called microreactors small enough to fit on truck trailer at Idaho National Laboratory.
Elsewhere, it was revealed that New York State is set to build America’s first major new nuclear plant in more than 15 years, aiming to add at least 1 gigawatt of generating capacity to that of its existing sites, while Texas has selected Hyundai to help construct a nuclear-powered datacenter in the state.
In a separate announcement, the DoE said it was to make available funding of nearly $1 billion to advance the US critical minerals sector. The notices of funding opportunities (NOFO) will cover processes in the rare-earth magnet supply chain, plus those to refine gallium, gallium nitride, germanium, and silicon carbide for use in semiconductors.
Funding will also go to US industrial facilities that have the potential to produce valuable mineral byproducts from existing industrial processes, and projects to recover critical minerals from industrial wastewater. The goal of the whole scheme is to reduce America’s dependence on foreign sources (i.e. China) of rare earth elements. ®