The New Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program is a new DOE project which will receive $230 million this year.
“This can be a game changer,” a nuclear engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Jacopo Buongiorno said, as quoted by Science, a media outlet. “It’s time for the community to go from designing paper reactors to building demonstrations.”
The US at this time gets around 20 percent of its energy from nuclear reactors. However, the average age of reactors in the US is 38 years old.
Due to that, old reactors are slated to close and the industry’s proportion of the electricity supply is expected to start to fall.
In turn, new, small modular nuclear reactors should have the most potential to decrease the up-front costs of nuclear power while improving its safety.